As a young adult, your generation includes the next leaders for our country.  You will be the teachers, lawyers, doctors, politicians – as well as the next husbands, wives, and parents.  You and your peers have the power to rebuild strong families and communities in the United States.

You can use your talents NOW to share the truth with others.  The truth is:

• There is an epidemic of broken families in the U.S.  Research over the past several decades has provided us with this truth:  low-conflict, long-lasting marriages are good for men and women, as well as for children.

• There is an epidemic of sexually transmitted infections in the U.S.  The numbers speak for themselves:  about 19 million new STI cases occur each year.

• There is an epidemic of longing for meaning and belonging in the U.S.  Campus counseling centers across our country are working furiously to keep us with the significant increase in serious psychological problems among their student populations.  Casual sex, broken families, relativism and gender confusion…the list goes on.

Research relevant topics for school projects (i.e. stem cell research, abortion, Roe v. Wade and related legislation)

Write editorials – in magazines, your school paper or local newspaper – responding to current events, research, media, etc.  You can sharpen your writing skills and be a voice for young adults who are living lives of integrity.

Speak out!  You can provide written or videotaped testimonies of why you believe that these issues are critical in our country, providing support to others who believe the way that you do and providing evidence to decision-makers (i.e. administrators, health care professionals, politicians, etc) that there are young adults like you out there!

Provide services on your campus.  You can deliver posters to be displayed on dorm floors or compile bulletin board kits for RA’s.  Offer to be a peer advocate for your campus health service and give talks on healthy relationships or the realities of the STD epidemic.  Start a book club – choose books like “Unprotected” or “Girls Gone Mild” to read and discuss.

- Kay Kiefer, RN (Director of MSC)

What Happens Next?

What is it that we’re teaching and preparing students for when they leave the halls of our local high schools? Are we sending them off to academia where their minds will be stimulated by learned professors, where they will lounge around philosophizing like the characters in “Dead Poets’ Society,” where their every concern is about making the grade?

I think we all know the answer to that question. Students are leaving their parents’ homes and communities to enter into some sort of strange parent-less land, a land of few boundaries, a land of exploration…a land unlike any other. College is a time of exploration and of “finding oneself,” but to what extent? And why does it seem to be centered around sex?

An April 4^th article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Sex Education,” decries the failure of the “hook up” culture present on most college campuses. (A “hook up” is an ambiguous term employed when two people get together without a relationship attachment, and engage in some sort of physical sexual activity, which can range from “making out” to intercourse.) According to this article, students can now relax on the weekends by attending theme parties. These parties are not what you might expect; where else can young people attend a “CEO’s and Office Ho’s,” or “Millionaires and Maids” party? Apparently, at our institutions of higher learning.