This weekend, I went canning for Dance Marathon during the Homecoming tailgate. This is when a group of people go out to the tailgate with cans and collect money for a cause.

When I was canning, we went to all kinds of tailgates. We went to the student tailgate, parent tailgate, scholarship tailgate and all over. I found that the students and recent graduates were by far more willing to donate whatever they had in their wallet more than the adults were. Every once in a while we would get a $5 or $10 bill from an adult, but almost every time we asked a student, they looked in their wallet/purse and pulled out whatever they had. Sometimes that was just a few quarters and sometimes it was three or four dollars. I was surprised to find that when we all came together those who went to the student lot had much more in their cans than those who went to the adult lots.

College students sometimes get a bad rap, but this is usually because adults think back on their own experiences in college, and they rely on this to make judgments. They think nothing has changed when, in fact, college now is much different than what college looked like in the past.

First of all, we are competing with a lot more people  so we have to work harder in college to ensure a job in the future. But at the same time we have become much more involved in giving back to our community, and I think this is the reason why we are a more generous community than our predecessors.

But maybe I’m being a little naïve; perhaps the generosity has something to do with the students being a little drunker than the parents so they didn’t care as much. However, I’d like to think it’s because UNI has created this culture where it is common to help out an organizations that do so much good.

This culture of generosity and unselfishness is quite outstanding; and I don’t think that it is just UNI’s campus. I think that young people in general are more likely to help someone else out.

When we were canning, we would go up to groups of adults and they would often make eye contact with us before turning their bodies away in hopes that we would “take the hint” and skip their tailgate. This just made me all the more eager to go up to them and tell them about all the great things that Dance Marathon is doing and what they are missing out on.

I was speaking with a friend from work the other day and she told me a story about an experience she had while in a Walmart parking lot. She said an elderly lady had fallen and couldn’t get up. Instantly, my friend ran to the elderly women and made sure she was okay. As she was doing this, she saw many people just walking by and looking instead of offering a helping hand; most of these people were middle-aged adults.

I am not a middle-aged adult, so I don’t know exactly what their lives are like, but I can’t imagine it is so rigorous that they can’t help out others by giving their time or money to a worthy cause. I realize they may have bills to pay and children to care for, but they did purchase their tailgating spot, along with all the beer and food they are drinking and eating, so the least they could do is spare $20 for an organization that helps those in need.

This is the generation that is, in many ways, dictating what our future will look like. We as a generation need to step up and be an example. The world needs young people like us; the world needs our generosity.