Community Inaction Day Great Success

This Wednesday marked Exeter's annual Community Inaction Day, where students and teachers gathered together to do little or no service for the Exeter community. “I'm so proud of the ‘work’ our students put in today,” remarked Principal Hassan. “They really made a mild to mediocre effect on our community.”Activities included both on-campus projects as well as off-campus trips, such as wiping the windows of the Academy Library, cleaning a local beach, and helping at a children’s center. “These trips were selected with care to give the best possible photo opportunities,” one event organizer said. “You’ll notice that we actually brought rakes to a lot of the sites that required no raking, just so students could be photographed leaning on the rakes as if they had just done hard work.”Fifty to a hundred students signed on to “throw rocks into the ocean” at a local beach, because “there are too many rocks here,” according to the program description. “The Seacoast Science Center is hosting an upcoming 5K,” the event leader explained. “The storms this winter brought too many rocks up by the footpath, so we need students to throw all these rocks back into the ocean.” Students applauded the anti-environmentalist spirit, citing the project as Exeter’s natural next step after our egregious paper waste and massive investments in oil companies. “It felt great to choose people over nature by throwing these rocks into the ocean, where they probably crushed a lot of small crabs,” one student said. “I felt powerful.”The Academy’s crew team signed up to clean the Exeter boathouse, since, in the words of one rower, “we are the only community that matters.” When asked to comment on other events, such as volunteering at a local elementary school, the student responded, “I don’t have time to help children, I am too busy working on my 2K time.”Luckily, there were plenty of generous students willing to help children in need. “We went to a local school and assembled Bike Safety Packets, which included things like reflectors and pencils,” one student said. “I’m pretty sure riding a bike while using a pencil is not safe, but that’s the kind of spirit Community Inaction Day is meant to foster.”Students also headed to the Exeter Housing Authority. “We were supposed to rake stuff, but there were landscaping people there, so we just stood there,” a student said of the experience. The group finished at 9:40 am, rather than the expected end time of 12:30 pm, after a satisfyingly average hour of “community service.”All in all, Principle Hassan pronounced the event an “adequate, if not downright acceptable” day of community inaction. “Exeter tries its best to teach students how to do something halfway or not at all, but act as if they have done the work. This method is reflected in almost all of our English and history Harkness classes. Community Inaction Day is just another way to teach this lesson.”