Random Acts of Writing: A serious health issue debate?
By Craig Carter
Sunday, September 7, 2008 12:32 AM PDT
Recently, a group of college presidents released a statement saying they’d like to open a debate in regard to lowering the drinking age to 18.
I’m really not so certain lowering the drinking age is a good idea because I cannot help but remember what happened when we tried this before.
The year I turned 18, which, admittedly, was a long, long time ago, Montana was one of many states that came to the grand conclusion that if a young person was old enough to serve their country, they were old enough to get sloshed in a bar legally. I was thrilled because, living in a college town, all the action was in the bars, and, because it was a college town, fake ID’s were very expensive. (Not that I ever had one. Wink.)
So they gave us the vote and the right to drink at the same time, and we 18-year-olds made full use of one of those rights while completely ignoring the other. (Guess which right we ignored and which we embraced totally.)
Well, in the ensuing years, a funny thing happened. Alcohol-related car accidents involving people twixt the ages of 18 and 21 skyrocketed. So lawmakers decided to raise the drinking age back to 21.
Interestingly enough, the idea that the age of 21 constituted adulthood originated in the Middle Ages, when it was widely believed a young man would have enough bulk by that age to wear a suit of armor without being overwhelmed by the weight. There’s an analogy in there, but I’m not going to elaborate. You’re smart people. Figure it out for yourself.
And now college presidents, who are understandably concerned about binge drinking on their campuses, have said they’d like us to debate the virtue of lowering the drinking age. They didn’t say they wanted to lower the drinking age next Tuesday afternoon. They just said they wanted to raise the debate. Which naturally got the wound-tight crowd worked into a lather, wherein they spent days and days on cable news, whining irresponsible college presidents wanted to lower the drinking age.
Let me repeat. The college presidents didn’t say they wanted to lower the drinking age next Tuesday. They just wanted the debate to be open, in the interest of maybe solving a problem plaguing college campuses around the country.
You see, according to some who know about such things, it seems just because the drinking age is 21, that doesn’t necessarily mean no one under that age is drinking. Especially on college campuses, where it seems students that are older than 21 don’t really have much of a problem with inviting underage students to their parties. (Especially if they’re cute and have big bazongas.) And since there’s the “romance” of doing something you’re not supposed to be doing involved, a lot of those underage drinkers drink to an excess that is nearly unimaginable and some of them get seriously ill, and a few of them die. Just so you know, I myself never indulged in binge drinking because we already had a binge drinker in our house, and two would have been redundant. But I digress.
Seriously, though, I don’t really think lowering the drinking age is going to curb binge drinking on college campuses, and you know something? I don’t think college presidents think lowering the drinking age is going to curb binge drinking, either. I think they just wanted to make the general public aware of a serious public health issue, and they wanted the country at large to debate it in an adult manner.
Yeah, I’m with you. Expecting Americans to debate a serious health issue in an adult manner is just way too much to ask. Americans prefer to conduct their serious debates in as immature and reactionary a fashion as possible.
What were those college presidents thinking? You’d think they’d be smarter than that. I mean, they are college presidents.
