Imagine spending the first Saturday of the new school year lying in an emergency room cot next to the police blotter, while cursing every arrest that comes through to disturb your rest.

While this may not be as traumatizing of an experience as going to the ER on the first day of freshman year because your roommate bashed your head in with an iron, it is an enlightening experience nonetheless.

As call after staticky call came in over the radio, a bleak picture was painted.

‘We need back up in the library parking lot there is a girl fight.’

Now your first thought, like mine, probably was, ‘What kind of policeofficers need back up for two chicks swatting at each other?’

But that thought was immediately interrupted by, ‘A white male in a tank top hit the victim outside of Junction. We are now behind a man who matches the description.’

‘…He just went straight in the right-hand turn lane.’

‘…Twenty-three-year-old male driving on a suspended license.’

Or, how about the guy who stumbles through the front door with a hospital bracelet already on and bandages on his face? He sheepishly hangs his head and mumbles to the staring nurses, ‘Uh, I kinda tried to sneak out, but now I don’t know where my room is.’

Then another message comes in: ‘Unidentified man banging on the front door of a residence, police are circling the premises now.’

And the good times kept rolling, hour after hour.

Long into the morning, people were still reaping the consequences of bad choices.

They were sound bites of pleasure that somehow went wrong. Imagine the ongoing consequences from that one evening.

For months and months to come, there are people whose lives are changed from that one Saturday night.

Relationships damaged. Hours spent trying to work off fines and court costs. Energy spent trying to find rides to get to work, school or the grocery store when licenses are suspended. Families angry and hurt.

We all realize what the results of foolish behavior are, but sometimes it is hard to comprehend how far it reaches families, courts, police officers, nurses, store owners, roommates, boyfriends, girlfriends. One action’s tentacles spread into so many facets of life.

But, we need to be set free. We need to ‘experience’ life. That’s what we tell Mom and Dad, right?

Yet, life is too short for us to make every mistake for ourselves.

We learn through observation and through gathering information and using our mind to reason and logic.

So by the time we arrive at college, we should theoretically have observed enough to be able to make reasonable and wise decisions for ourselves.

Unfortunately, we confuse freedom with rebellion.

Rebellion is when we try to take our lives into our own hands. We feel that someone else has been in too much control for too long.

And now, we get a shot.

We tell ourselves, ‘I want to do what I want to do. I have a right. I deserve it. I want to look out for number one because if I don’t then who will,’ right?

But when everyone starts framing their lives in a ‘me first’ bubble, it leads to situations where each person’s bubble starts bumping up against another’s. Eventually they burst.

They burst like in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when a man shot his sister over a bag of ice.

If you have a conflict with a roommate, you don’t have to beat her senseless to know that that is not a constructive way to handle the situation.

The chatter among fellow students shows that most people were shocked when that incident happened and did not think it was acceptable behavior.

They did not experience it, but their observation of the scenario led them to that logical conclusion.

A rebellious mentality can only survive for so long without leading to destructive results.

Ask yourself: Will rebellion bring satisfaction? Will it make you feel really alive or significant?

Maybe for a time, but eventually you will be less free than you were before, trapped by the never ending cycle of looking out for yourself so much that you are blinded to the needs of others.

Like the needs of a roommate who wants to walk around without a giant welt on her head.

Or like the needs of a sister who wants a bag of ice.

If your ‘need’ is still to ‘experience’ life to figure all this out, then maybe we can arrange a night by the police blotter.