Our generation sprouts a social conscience on alternative breaks By Katie Jentleson
Spring 2006 Last March, The American Medical Association (AMA) shed an accusatory
light on the delinquent pastime that is the college spring break. The
indictment came in the form of a poll of college women and graduates,
aged 17-35; amongst other lascivous details of spring break debauchery,
the study revealed that 83 percent of respondents agreed spring break
involved more or heavier drinking than occurs on college campuses and
75 percent agree that spring break leads to increased sexual behavior.
The AMA’s statistical rendering of what could be termed “the wet
T-shirt problem” was succeeded by more disheartening spring break
coverage: On April 2, New York Times writer Alex Williams published
the article, “Before Spring Break: the Anorexic Challenge,” which
documented how girls as young as 15 were using fad diets to drop pounds
rapidly on the eve of their tummy-bearing vacations.
 (photo courtesy of Adam Jentleson)
To test this hypothesis, I spoke with Justin Davis ’07 and Tom Noble ‘08, two student leaders armed with enough experience in social work and community service to feed a small country. (If it were socially acceptable to include “good conscience” as a category on a resume, these guys would have a hard time keeping theirs down to a page). This spring, Davis founded Katrina on the Ground, a national student-run intitiative that mobilized 2,000 students from over 100 different colleges to New Orleans in March. Meanwhile, the aptly named Noble serves as the president for the Cornell organization Alternative Spring Breaks (ASB), which sends groups of students in various service-oriented directions around the nation every spring.
Even though spring break is now over and has been relegated to the historical annals of our Facebook albums, the impressive increase in student activism should be something we remember. Could these increasingly popular alternative spring breaks be a sign of the the dispositional metamorphisis that our generation has been wating for, the great apathy thaw?
 (photo courtesy of Alina Smirnova)
But if the spring break is seen as a week-long liberation from the stresses of winter semester, then ASB trips are kind of like the ultimate spring break. From what Noble says, you will be completely removed from all that you know, ensconced in unorthodox situations that endow you with the kind of perspective which you could never achieve from within the campus bubble. Noble identifies his most memorable moment in Kensington this past March, when he spoke with a recovering crack addict at New Jerusalem, a rehabilitation center in Philadelphia. “He was telling the story of how drugs affected his life. He was addicted to crack—this was three or four years ago. It was so bad that he pulled a gun on his son,” says Noble. “Talking to this guy, it’s like, no way is this guy who he’s talking about. He’s the sweetest man I’ve ever met in my life...People talk about a spiritual awakening—you could actually see it in this person.” These kinds of experiences are what Noble finds so valuable about the time he spends volunteering. He says, “I’m lucky enough to be going to a school like this and getting such an academic opportunity, but you know sometimes I feel like I’m getting so much more out of these breaks.”
What is unique about the ASB trips is that they are committed to service learning, as opposed to traditional community service. Noble says this is particularly true of the trip he led to Kensington, where the group worked with Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an advocacy group founded by six single mothers in the 1990s. “We spend a lot of time just talking with the activists. It’s a lot of listening and workshops. The food distribution, the blanket distribution is almost secondary,” Noble says. “The learning is what’s meaningful.”
Of course, it takes a unique person to prefer the self-edifying and socially constructive character of an ASB trip to a self-annihilating and socially neutral (or possibly destructive, depending on how virile your mojo is) character of a traditional spring break. I tried to uncover the secret ingredient to the average do-gooder’s constitution, though my attempts at generalization were largely unsuccessful.
It turns out there isn’t just one thing. Secretly, I was hoping that there was, because if we could reduce the quality of conscienciousness to one germ, then maybe we would have an easier time spreading it. But Noble assures me that this is not the case. The people who participate in alternative spring breaks have little more in common than the trips themselves. He says“It’s a really wide range of people. There are people who come from backgrounds where these issues are relevant—people who have been affected by HIV/AIDs or poverty or homelessness. So there are people like that, but there are also people who come from very stable backgrounds who are just willing to go on these trips.”
 (photo courtesy of Alina Smirnova)
But how to jumpstart the idlers? Davis asserts that increased community service among our generation will be a likely fallout of Katrina, and the spring break trips in particular. He says, “Once you see hundreds of others, [who are saying] I just came back from New Orleans, where I spent my Spring Break, you will be like, ‘Wow I was in Cancun, drinking and shaking my butt and doing crazy stuff, so next year I think I might do something different.’” Davis seems convinced that spring break activism will have long term effects on the decision making process of our generation. “It’s gonna get people to start thinking about what choices they make and how those choices affect the United States,” he says.
I can say, unequivocally, that Davis is right, at least when it comes to me. My interest in alternative spring breaks perked up sometime in March. As I began asking around about my friends’ spring break plans, it seemed like everyone was going to be acting a saint: building a house, comforting a victim of domestic abuse, or putting in time in Louisiana. Meanwhile, I was planning on heading down to the Outer Banks with the objective of doing absolutely nothing. I immediately became defensive—a friend and I made a pact to do as much good as we could while at the beach, to make up for our selfishness. But even that hackneyed excuse for a progressive intitative failed. In fact, we ended up needing our share of help. We dispatched AAA three times, on account of a busted rim, a battery beyond resuscitation and, of course, a Buick stuck in the sand. We also benefited from the benevolent propripetor of the local sunglasses and video rental hut who lent us a DVD player, free of charge, since it rained most of the week (karma’s vengeance). And on the last day while we waited for the ferry, a middle aged biker donated a Tupperware of dried fruit to us, just out of the goodness of his leathery heart. So not only did we not help, we weren’t even very self-sufficient.
 (photo courtesy of Alina Smirnova)
Generally, Solari is optimistic about where our generation will go from here. He says, “You know there’s kind of this whole thing that our generation is not that involved, that we don’t really do that much, that we don’t care, but given what we see in New Orleans, I completely disagree.” |
