You’ve been given a free education from the time you were 4 years old – something that is beyond the reach of kids in many countries. Your community transported you safely to and from school every day. Most of your textbooks and school supplies have been “free.” Nurses come to your school every day to help you remain healthy.

If you weren’t able to keep up with your peers, we’ve paid through the nose to get you special help. If you were smarter than your peers, we paid through the nose to help you excel above everyone else. We’ve built new classrooms for you and furnished them with whatever the high-priced consultants who we hired told us needed to be there. We’ve dropped the student/teacher ratio for you and also given your teachers competitive pay, health insurance, disability and life insurance, sick days, bereavement days, paid vacations, free parking, tuition reimbursement and retirement benefits.

We built expensive athletic facilities so that a handful of you can brag that you are better at tossing a ball around than other kids. Good for you. We pay people to clean up before you arrive each morning and to clean up after you’ve gone home to watch TV, play your video games, or text your friends.

The money to fund all of this for you comes from all of us taxpayers. Yes. Your parents pay some of these taxes, but few parents pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of your education. Instead, that cost becomes the burden of society, including the elderly.

Your community is asking you to give back 10 hours each year that you are in high school to help keep and make our communities great. That’s less than two minutes a day per year. You tell us that you can’t possibly make this much time. You’re busy. You have a job after school. It would interfere with your sports. You’re too lazy to walk and it would be a hardship for your parents to have to drive you. Or, some other lame excuse. And, you also tell us that it wouldn’t be “volunteering” if you were forced to do it.

All right. So, tell us. What are you doing to make your community and this world a better place? You’re about to graduate from high school. You’re not a cute little baby anymore – not even a cute little kid. You’re about to become an adult. It’s time that you realize that the world doesn’t revolve around you.

If you don’t care about visiting some of your neighbors now living in nursing homes and who still pay for your education, then at least care about your peers. While you are “too busy” to help others who aren’t in your own little world, nine million kids are starving to death in other parts of our world. That’s 17 children – every minute – who die from hunger. We’re asking you for two of those minutes.

Frankly, you’re right. We shouldn’t have to “require” you to give back to your community. You should know enough by now and care enough about your world that you instinctively feel passionate about giving back – without being asked.

So…do you?

Brad McCurtain

Raymond