First Day of Class!!

Fraternities and Sororities have this stigma about them. It's no secret. What do people do over the weekend? "Oh I went to this CRAZY frat party with slutty sorority girls everywhere!!"

Yea... about that...

The time of change to the image of fraternal organizations is way past due. Many organizations are built upon the principles of uplifting their surrounding community, brotherhood or sisterhood, service, and scholarship among other things. However, the public rarely sees these principles in action. They see the social gatherings however CrAzY or mellow they may be. Is this because that's all the organization does? H-to-the-No! An ugly truth about the college student is the fact that the majority of the population cares about a party exponentially more than they care about service. It's not that college students are just selfish bastards, but often we don't equate service with fun, even though more often than not you will have fun whenever you're serving your community (let's call this "constructive socialization"). Part of our responsibility as leaders on this campus is to serve and give back to the community that raised us. However to do this, we need to make service attractive to the people we are inviting to help us.

Making sandwiches for a local soup kitchen is in reality the ideal way for Greek Organizations to bond (again... "constructive socialization!!" is it beginning to catch on??). Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were a part of almost every one's childhood, and (at least in my opinion) they're still the greatest thing since sliced bread. The work actually made the initial conversations less awkward. Instead of the standard "here's an index card find out these things about your partner and then introduce them", we got to hold actual conversations that were each unique and wonderfully unstructured.

From this class period it finally clicked in my head that maybe we should change the way we present some of our service projects . Not necessarily changing the location and what we do, but just change the connotation behind it(see how much better "constructive socialization" sounds?). Yes we're all told it's good to volunteer, you need to volunteer to get into a good school, volunteering makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But when it comes down to it, there is a scarce minority of the people on campus who are willing to get up early on a Saturday to help their community. How exactly do we change this? I really have no idea! I'm open to suggestions... some people give food, gifts, incentives, or what-have-you. Maybe this is the pay it forward part of volunteering. In a perfect world people would want to volunteer for the sake of humanity... in our world, it's all about what can IIIIIIII get from volunteering?

Well optimists of the world... I guess we have some work to do...

Until next time... Skee-Wee to the Bloggers