This Thanksgiving I'm Thankful for Jerks

Thanksgiving is the time to give our thanks...obviously. And every year, I'm thankful for the typical few things: good friends, great family, good year, etc. But this year I'm giving an extra thanks...to jerks.

Jerks? Why on Earth would I be thankful for them? 

I'm thankful to them because I love what follows their actions. 

A Purpled Goodes

Last December after the Engineering Class of 2016 got their GPAs and had them purpled, someone on Facebook posted on our university's Overheard group about seeing two Engineering frosh spilling purple paint (perhaps even gentian) on the steps of the Commerce building and then making a run for it. 

What jerks, right?!

Well, a few hours later, the following picture was posted by another student. 

Image c/o Alex B.

Apparently, another group of Engineering Frosh had gotten together and worked away for a couple of hours to clean up someone else's mess. I'm not sure how many students would have responded the same way. I will admit that I did not take up the initiative to clean it up. My response was similar to many others: "Why should I spend time cleaning up someone else's mess? This is ridiculous! It's going to be a pain for the custodial staff to deal with that." 

But someone had taken that initiative. Because they had realized that although two complete assholes had decided to spill paint on the steps and that it would be a LOT of work to clean it up, the school was their home and there was no way they were going to let someone else deal with the actions of their classmates. 

Homecoming 2013 - Part One

This past weekend, we got to experience our first Homecoming in 5 years. While most of the weekend is pretty tame, Saturday night is usually when it gets rowdy. And that too, on just one street. The infamous Aberdeen Street. Thousands of students gather on Aberdeen every Saturday night to party it up. This year was no different. 

However, what was different was how the street looked the next morning.

Image c/o Mike S.

Big deal, right? It's clean. But what I care about is who cleaned it. It was the students. There was hardly a beer bottle or red cup in sight. Many students woke up early Sunday morning and got to work to clean up the street. Now, I'm not calling everyone who was there partying jerks. That's not the case. However, I know that 85% of those people did not clean up their booze and cups.

Words cannot describe how proud I am to belong to a student community such as this. Leading up to the weekend, there was a lot of emphasis placed on ensuring that Homecoming was here to stay. So to have the student body come together and ensure this was truly amazing. 

I'm thankful everyday to go to this wonderful school. I'm thankful for how students always come together to fix a problem regardless of whether or not they played a direct role in creating the problem in the first place. I'm thankful for community and its importance to every Queen's student. 

So thank you, jerks. Your actions are often ridiculous and unnecessary but they manage to bring out the best in the rest of us.