Every year Student Association sponsors the Adopt-a-Family drive. The money collected is used to buy presents for local underprivileged families. Money for the drive is collected during all the lunches. As an Executive Board member, I helped out with the lunch donations.

From my four years at RB, there is one thing that I have become positive of. If you set up a table with a bucket for donations you will get approximately five dollars. If you walk around advertising that you are collecting money, you will get more around 20 dollars. So, on the last day of collections, I took the collection buckets to walk around.

Now, I completely understand some students do not bring money to school or they don’t have the money to spare. That is 100% respectable and I would never question that. As I was walking around though, the comments I heard from some students absolutely disgusted me. Some students had very mean words for the Adopt-a-Family drive that would not be appropriate to disclose in a school newspaper article. My favorite though was something along the lines of, “No I’m not donating, tell those people to get a job. I actually work for my money.”

First of all, we do not donate to people who can’t afford the latest iPod. We donate to people who are having trouble buying toiletries and food for their family.

Second of all, having a job that makes minimum wage isn’t always enough to support a family. If the only job you can find is one that pays minimum wage that is not your fault. Or perhaps the mom got laid off. How can you possibly control getting laid off, especially given our current economic status? Telling someone to get a job instead of donating is possibly one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard.

That same lunch period, though, there were students who renewed my faith in my peers. Particularly because of a student who donated ten dollars, a very above average amount, when the people surrounding them were not so supportive.

Basically, as naive as I sound, I just want to say to everyone think before you act. If you don’t want to support a cause, that is fine.

I would just love to know what possesses some of you to make those disgustingly ignorant comments, though. It makes me ashamed to say that I share a school with you.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”

--Submitted by Emily Mussio, Editor-in-Chief