The following editorial was originally published in the Tuesday, July 16, 1985 issue of the Journal.
With the realization that one half of our summer holidays are behind us, an unsettling question presents itself. What have we done with all of the time?
Each of us has our own answers. Some have been overemployed, trying to hold down two or more part-time jobs. Others have held down full-time positions, taken courses, and others have done a bit of each. Unfortunately, some have spent this long simply looking for a job.
But for most of the Queen’s students who were able to choose not to leave town when the winter term ended in April, our illusion of reality goes on.
The comfortable atmosphere of a university where being preppy is thought to be a way of life has been replaced by that of a trendy town trying to attract tourists and boaters. What more could any reasonable Queen’s student ask for?
The waterfront looks like something straight out of a beer commercial with its expensive sailboats, sailboards and hundreds of sun bathers lining the lakeshore by day; and it’s a well-dressed crowd that fills the popular bars to standing-room-only capacity at night.
Who is able to take advantage of all that this fair city has to offer? Certainly not the hundreds of unemployed college and university students who stayed in town after school finished thinking they could find a job. They just wish they could find work for minimum wage for the rest of the summer. They’re going to have a hard enough time scraping together enough money to go back to school without spending it frivolously in the summer.
Nor is it likely to be any other part of the unemployed workforce in the city.
They’ll tell you that it’s too expensive to go drinking in bars.
Fortunately for eveyone, the best things in the city are free for the taking. Its parks, with their wide, open grassy spaces and walkways are never closed. And the lakefront, the city’s greatest asset, is easily accessible to all. They provide some much-welcomed breathing space in the midst of the summer’s bustling tourism business.
So take some time this summer to enjoy what the city has to offer before you’re stuck back in the grind of a full academic load in the fall; before the leaves disappear; and before Kingston is the Limestone City once again.
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