Let's Fight About It Again!

I have already seen the legal drinking age change twice in my life (in 1972 and 1984) and lived through two sets of "debates" on the issue. Here comes the third debate and I'm hoping I'm cremated and buried next to the drainpipe at the church (I like to swim) before I endure another.

Like a couple who aren't happy if they aren't fighting, the College liberals have decided to take on the Reformer liberals at M.A.D.D. about letting kids drink again at 18. It is called the the Amethyst Initiative. College Presidents who sign the initiative agree it is time for a debate on the legal age to drink. Only debate, mind you. No one says they are actually for it. Being an invertebrate is a job requirement for College Presidents.

Mindful of their dignity, they couldn't just name it something plebeian like D.R.I.N.K.U.P. They had to link it to Greek Mythology. A nice girl named Amethyst was out drinking with Dionysus. This was not a good idea because he always gets amorous when he's in his cups. Just as he was reaching for Amethyst's cups, Diana turned her into a white stone. Diana always was "helping" young girls in this manner because she hated the competition. Dionysus spilled some wine on the White rock and all the rock's progeny became cheap gemstones.

Most Greek scientists like Aristotle and were either philosophical about mythology's warped logic or they were stoic and kept their mouths shut. That's why today we study about the Philosopher-Scientists and Stoics in school.

Geeze, I'm rattling on like Dionysus on his third wine cooler here.

The Amethyst people blame the current law as the cause of binge drinking. The M.A.D.D. people blame the College Presidents for "shirking their responsibility to protect students from the dangers of underage drinking". What are the poor Presidents supposed to do? Throw themselves in front of the beer wagon?

M.A.D.D. thinks that schools should start teaching about the evils of drink in the 4th grade. Here in Valdosta we have these programs already. Young children learn to get shirty with their Dad for having a martini before dinner. Dad unlearns them real quick, you betcha.

Amethyst links over to the parent website "Choose Reponsibility" where they propose that young people aged 19 and 20 should be required to take courses to obtain a "Licence To Drink". Talk about peer pressure. How could you face your peers after having flunked the drinking test?

I hate to be profane here, but my God in Heaven, when you gave people Free Will couldn't you have put them through a licencing process first so they wouldn't make such asses of themselves?

Before the temperance movement took away our innocence, kids used to drink with their parents when their parents thought they were old enough to drink. Everyone was comfortably unaware that there was a binge drinking problem because everyone was drunk. Kind of like Adam and Eve being happily and oblivously trashed in the Garden of Evil until Carrie A. Nation slithered into the place and started smashing all the bar furniture.

Kids today come to college out of a hermetically sealed enviroment called home where they can't have sex in the bedroom when they want, can't stay out all hours, can't get drunk in the living room, and have to take out the trash. After so many years of this brutal parental oppression, they escape to college and go wack-a-doodle. It dawns on them in their Junior year that the party ends when they graduate so, they start piercing and tattoing themselves silly. Pitiful. You'd get drunk, too.

The answer is to let people in college drink legally in a safe enviroment. This can be done now with no changes in laws and no classes, or licencing, or idiotic debates, or, horrors! -- draconian enforcment of the laws. The solution is found in the Federal Law in plain sight.

When I first picked up the law and found that underage drinking was allowed "when accompanied by a parent, spouse or legal guardian age 21 or older" I thought I had found the answer. Then my wife told me that if I started going to college keggers with the kids, she was going to do a Lorena Bobbit on me. That ended that.

So, I picked up the law again and there it was: underage drinking can be allowed "in private clubs or establishments". What is a Fraternity or Sorority anyway? Talk about your Greek Revivals on campus. Instead of banning alcohol at Greek Houses, you turn them into Country Clubs. Put a mini-golf in the back yard. Let the non-Greeks form drinking clubs and rent out rooms at the student union. Put the shuttle buses to work carrying everyone back to the dorm.

Permitted and encouraged, drunkeness will lose its cachet.

This idea is not without its dangers. Number one in my mind is that the Amethyst Initiative and the M.A.D.D. people will join legs to stomp the living life out of me for suggesting it. There are reasons why so many of those Greeks were Stoic.

Possum? It's What's for Dinner

Animal activists were horrified at a fraternity at the University of Georgia that "killed, skinned, cooked, and ate" a raccoon at a park in Athens. Just twenty miles from this keyboard in Echols County this is what is known as "supper". It could well be opossum or armadillo on the half-shell -- depending on what wild animal looked directly into the high powered Q-Beam floodlight as it shown over the baited field last night.

These people are also squealing about a drunken pet pig that was found on a campus. Getting your pet drunk has been going on as long as people have been getting drunk and have had pets. Would they have been upset if the frat boys had killed and eaten the pig? Aren't the squeamish already asking that we anesthetize animals before slaughter?

In my fraternity we had a dog named "Dammit" because that was what we shouted at him all the time. Dammit acquired the taste for beer by licking up the normal spillage at the sloppy end of a televised football game. Before long, Dammit started begging when people opened a beer.

We thought it was cute until Dammit was alone one day and ripped open a case of beer. He bashed a six-pack around on its little plastic rings until something gave and spilled. Dammit picked up several unprintable nicknames after that one.

A meeting was held and it was decided that Dammit was going on the wagon. The next morning, he was locked up in one of the bedrooms. When we came back after lunch we found Dammit passed out on the floor with a broken bottle of Crown Royal he had smelled out from the top drawer of the dresser. Crown Royal -- this was serious.

We chained Dammit up in the garage and made sure his chain run did not approach any alcohol. In our garage that took some doing and emptying the place took most of the afternoon as we carried empties and half empties to the garbage. Dammit howled and howled the entire time. We went inside and had a beer. When things got quiet outside someone went out and snuck a peek to find Dammit's collar on the floor and no Dammit.

Oh, did we look and look for that dog. Oh, did we piss off so many people driving down their street shouting "Dammit! Dammit!” It took a week to find that dog and then only on a lucky break when some pledges spotted him hanging around outside of the ABC Liquor store begging for handouts.

It was time for professional help. We took the dog to a vet hoping he would have a canine drunk tank or maybe some doggy anabuse pills.

"Boys," he said, looking over his glasses, "the only way I can stop this dog from drinking is to put him down. Once a dog is hooked on hooch, he's history." He stared at us and we stared at the floor and he made us promise not to spill beer on the floor anymore and let the dog drink it up.

We buried Dammit under a headstone made with beer cans. We didn't swear off eating squirrel or frog legs, or possum, but we never again fed alcohol to a dog. Giving a monkey a lit cigarette? Ahhhhh, That's another matter altogether....