CREDIT: NASTCO
Becoming an adult can be a tough thing to go through, but remembering your responsibilities over rights is a key stepping stone to making that transition.

Family expectations, education demands, career goals, the influence of the community you came from, these are some of the key factors that impact a student making the journey between being a teenager and an adult.

The journey isn’t always easy because there are usually some personal issues to try to take care of along the way. A student might discover they have anxiety or depression, or is having a hard time coping with what seems like an information overload. Another person might be dealing with rising debt or with an addictive personality.

Those things can definitely complicate life. Whatever help is available from student support or counselling services to address those kinds of difficulties, take it.

What I want to do here, though, is to consider some deeper issues. Let’s see if I can cover a few in the space I have in the column today.

First, I would say, think more about responsibilities than rights. It is not difficult to find someone who will tell you about your rights. You may have rights as a woman, a man, an Indigenous person, an immigrant, a business owner, a Muslim, a Catholic, a transgendered person, a pot user, a person dealing with an ability/disability challenge, or someone who is a member of any other group you identify with. There will be times when it is important for you to stand up and be counted.

However, generally, but not always, but generally, it is more important for us to think about our responsibilities than our rights. If we don’t, we risk seeing ourselves mainly as victims. I am not saying we aren’t victims. We all are and some more than others, absolutely, which is a fact not to be taken lightly. However, for someone to think of themselves mainly as a victim becomes self-defeating. It can put a person on an agenda of hypersensitivity to their own needs while discounting what others value.

Responsibilities. The Christian tradition, grounded in the words of Jesus, teaches, “love your neighbour”. Paul (known as “Saint Paul” or the “Apostle Paul”) developed that teaching: “Consider others better than yourselves.”

We are responsible for others. Further, the Christian faith is saturated with instructions about hard work, compassion, truthfulness and self-control with respect to our sexuality (among other things) because we are responsible for the well-being of the other.

This brings the question of responsibility down to the everyday. I am responsible to look out for the people I am in touch with. That means I have to make sure I’m doing all I can to ensure that my wife has a fulfilling day. I am responsible for the feeding, housing and emotional needs of my children and my parents too.

Whenever I am in a classroom situation (not that often anymore, but at least a few days a year), I have a responsibility to the instructor to engage with them. I should not regard them as a mere talking head, or as an irritant due to something about their manner I don’t like.

I am responsible to my employer and to the colleagues who work alongside me as well to those who work “under” me. I am responsible to help those who are left behind by the systems of our world that generate opportunity and wealth.

I have a responsibility to live an alert, sober life. I must not to let opportunities slip by because I am spending too much time with beverages served in pints and shot glasses. I must not throw away precious hours zoned out on cannabis, hours I will never get back.

That’s a start on responsibility. If you accept responsibility, you will probably do well in life. Likely you already know that, so maybe all I’m doing is reinforcing something you have by now accepted. Still, maybe it’s helpful to hear it again.

Maybe I can try a few thoughts about one other area. Tribal identities. Be careful about them. By tribal identities I mean the habit of seeing yourself mainly and firmly as a member of this group or that one, in opposition to others.

You may think of yourself as a political conservative or a member of the alt-right. You might consider yourself to be a social liberal, a third-wave feminist, a follower of neo-liberal economics, a capitalist or a member of a group that identifies very strongly along lines of gender.

The thing about isms, like conservatism, liberalism, feminism, capitalism, is that they tend to become all-consuming. They can help fragment society into segments in which people talk only to each other.

You go to parties to confirm what you already know. You protest when your group feels threatened, even if you are not all that sure what exactly is being protested. After a while, you can hardly see the good that someone outside your group (or tribe) may have. That’s not a great place to be. And, in reality, it is a false place. That is because God’s world, including the social world and the world of ideas, is bigger than me or you or our group.

It is okay, I think, to see ourselves as a supporter of one point of view or another, but we still have to see what others are thinking and experiencing, trying to see things from the perspective that others and their groups have.

Actually, I think that is a way to further put into practise the ethos of loving the other, the neighbour.

The scary part is that you don’t know where it’s going to lead, but the fact that it can bring you to a different place is also the good part. This is because, if things go well, it will lead you to places of greater integrity, hope, faith and resiliency.

Plus, if you are intent on becoming an adult, you’ll want those.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.