Disaster Can’T Hold A Candle To Responsibility

Memo to college students: boring and responsible isn’t all bad.

A boring week night might be staying up late to study with a bright light in your room.

A boring weekend might be an evening spent not drinking beer until you are blotto.

A week ago, the Sigma Nu fraternity at Washington State University had anything but a boring time.

After an evening of fun, games and perhaps some chilled beverages, someone left a candle burning in the fraternity house as the students drifted into a deep sleep.

The candle caught a couch on fire.

The furniture fire went to the electrical system.

The electrical fire burned the roof off the third floor of the house, a floor where 14 students usually engage in the aforementioned deep sleep.

Candlelight surely is conducive to some activities college students find enjoyable, like sleeping deeply, or consuming beverages that make one’s eyelids as heavy as wet snow.

But candlelight and eyelids that won’t stay open almost led to headlines that would be dark and horrible.

And let’s not forget what the firefighters found on the first floor of the Sigma Nu house in Pullman.

It wasn’t water-logged term papers.

No, a young man was down in a spare room with his hands and feet bound in duct tape.

He apparently had a history of consuming chilled beverages and, before nodding off in a deep sleep, making a loud nuisance of himself.

So, a pal decided to play a prank with the duct tape.

Firefighters woke the young man, cut the tape from his ankles and led him safely from the burning building.

Afterward, fraternity members and some parents were claiming, no harm, no foul.

Sure, a candle left burning had caused $1 million in damage. And yeah, taping a guy’s hands and feet together was a prank that might have had a tragic consequence.

But no one died, and boys will be boys, so what’s the big deal?

In sober moments, many of us can think of many big deals that have grown from seemingly small deals. And that’s the rub for parents, law enforcement or anyone in a decision-making role.

How do you decide when to let the little stuff slide?

When do you decide that little stuff needs attention, so it doesn’t become big?

To suggest that fraternities and sororities shouldn’t pull pranks is only slightly more ludicrous than to ask the sun not to rise.

The same goes for candles.

They will be lit, and they will be forgotten.

Knowing these truths about the ways of young people suggests that someone at the universities, in the fraternities, and in families should dust off the Life Skills 101 guidelines.

For example, when you party, somebody needs to stay sober and account for every person, every time.

A similarly sober, serious-minded person needs to run a candle check before lights out.

It’s not much different from designating a driver, or swimming with a pal.

Beyond that, in the sober mornings after the fun, the folks who clearly had a problem with their booze, their drugs, or their burning candles need to be counseled and confronted.

That’s part of real life, not fraternity life.

This may be the key realization when something bad almost happens, but doesn’t.

A fire that doesn’t kill anyone is a gift, an early warning, a second chance.

Such a gift must be taken as a blessing and a wake-up reminder that when you live within any fraternity, whether it is at college, or a fraternity of co-workers, a fraternity of church, family or friends, it’s easy to lose perspective on what should be accepted.

From inside any fraternity of like minds and shared ideas, the idea of letting candles burn through the night and the notion of duct-taping people in spare rooms seems normal and right.

To the outside world, however, it’s clearly a recipe for disaster.

Recognizing the disasters waiting to happen in life is a skill that takes years of hard lessons to learn.

It’s why people wake up alcoholics at 30.

It’s a reason marriages break up when someone realizes too late what really matters.

It is a way you get fired from your job for something small even though you did the big things well.

The stronger your ties to the fraternity where you reside, the tougher to perceive the seeds of disaster being sown.

It’s not disloyal, in the end, to say a fraternity shouldn’t let a man be duct-taped without others knowing where he is and thinking of his well-being.

To have a candle patrol, or even a ban on candles, isn’t a violation of any fraternity code.

People who truly care about the fraternities of college, of the workplace, the family, church or state must never stop looking for those blind spots that can make it all tumble down.