Madi McEver, Campus Carrier Entertainment Editor

With the coming and going of Thanksgiving, the season of holiday cheer, giving and mass-consumption is upon us. As I watched the television advertise sale after sale and listened to harrowing accounts of shoppers jeopardizing the lives of their fellow human beings in order to get the item that they “needed,” I will admit that I was a little more than disgusted. 

I’m sure that most of us recognize the fact that none of these material goods will actually “change our lives.” Also, some of the things we buy are downright pointless or completely superfluous. It’s easy to recognize waste or frivolous spending during the holiday season, but what about during the rest of the year? 

I am generally a levelheaded individual who is not easily shaken, but a recent event hosted by students on our very own campus deeply troubled me. You might have seen the photo of the Dana/Thomas Berry “food fight” published in the last issue of The Carrier. According to the photo cutline, students had fun wrestling in a pool of mashed potatoes, slipping and sliding in creamed corn and dumping copious amounts of applesauce on each other. Meanwhile, children in Floyd County are going hungry.   

Did you know that approximately 60.2 percent of students in the Floyd County school district are eligible for free or reduced lunch? There a couple of schools in the area that have even higher percentages than average, with more than 95 percent of their students being eligible for free lunch. Do you ever wonder what happens when those students are on their winter break for two weeks? For many, being out of school means going hungry.

Globally, poor nutrition causes 45 percent of deaths in children under the age of five. According to the World Food Programme, that is somewhere around 3.1 million children per year. If that statistic is not upsetting in some manner, something is seriously wrong here. I applaud those individuals who donate their time and resources in order to save the lives of the youngest generation. 

I think that our community would benefit greatly from a lesson on compassion. We need to stop writing things off as someone else’s “personal problem,” and do something to help. Why is it that people are only stirred to action when some sort of large-scale tragedy strikes? If you think about it, the idea of 60 percent of Floyd county elementary students facing hunger is a tragedy. This is happening in our own community. It’s an issue that all of us, myself included, should be more concerned with than we currently are. 

I do not say all of this to condemn Berry students as a whole. It’s obvious that many are conscious of what they do with their excess. I just think that it is important to remember the heritage of Berry and the legacy of Martha Berry to wisely use the resources that you have been blessed with and always remember to share what you have been given with those who do not have the abilities provide for themselves. 

Let us not turn a blind eye to those suffering around us, but act on the wise words of the American author and minister Edward Everett Hale, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.”