School Dazed
By Mitch Berg
I can see all sorts of great arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18: if a kid can join the military and drive a submarine or operate a cannon, they should be able to get a beer. If someone is deemed responsible enough to sign a contract, vote, have paternity enforced or be charged as an adult, they’re old enough to drink.
As MLP notes, quite correctly, over at Casual Sundays, none of those are the reasons the university presidents are talking about pushing for a lower age:
Instead of arguing for American’s rights, and against the over reach of the federal government which put the current legal drinking age in place– raise the age in your state or we’ll cut off your federal highway funds– in what universe is that not blackmail?–they are using the nanny-state-non-argument that lowering the age will cut down on binge drinking.
No it won’t.
Kids don’t binge drink because the legal limit is 21, they do it because they are morons. Isn’t alcohol poisoning Darwinism at it’s best?
Why is it that some people (by “some people” I mean liberals), instead of reaching for a rock solid, Constitutional truth, would rather grab at the fluffy, gossamer of ‘we’re only doing it for your own good’ ?
What’s really going on here is not a push for the liberty of American adults but a bunch of college administrator’s who are trying to preserve as much of the nanny state as possible while avoiding the necessity of answering uncomfortable questions when their students die of stupidity.
Why yes – do read the whole thing.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:38 am
“…because they’re morons.” Ha! So true. I have binge-drank (could be grammatically incorrect there!) many times before…before 18 and after 21. Legal age didn’t have a thing to do with it. Pure stupidity and lack of forethought did….The only thing age does for you is make the hangovers worse and THEN you start to learn.
We bought beer at age 16…and in Colorado the legal age for 3.2 beer was 18…hard stuff was 21. We’d get 16 yr olds with mustaches to buy the hard stuff….made no difference how old anybody was. Course, we couldn’t sit in bars, but who wanted to do that anyway? We preferred the woods.
Then, I moved up here to N Minnesota and the age was 19 for everything…then changed to 21 at some point in the mid to late 70’s. All the while, 6 miles across the border you could drink anything at age 18. So everyone would go there….driving-not good.
I don’t think there is any answer to the college-age binge-drinker. It does just boil down to pure stupidity and lack of self-control. Some people never overcome either of those attributes no matter how old they get.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:12 am
Yeah, I had this whole cause celebre pegged as “please relieve us of the legal liability.” In loco parentis may be dead but a good personal injury lawyer can convince a jury that the college should have “done something.”
Funny thing is, if they lower the drinking age to 18, won’t that make a substantial proportion of the kids underage in their freshman year and then turn drinking age during that time? Or they just started drinking legally a few months back. That seems like the worst possible situation, assuming that they don’t just flout the law the minute the get to college.
I say lower it to 16. It’s not like we’d notice a difference in our neighborhood. The line inside Micky’s liquors might get longer, but the parking lot might clear out faster.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 am
That the drinking age is a Federal issue is pretty dumb.
That the drinking age is 21 isn’t much smarter.
Yeah, college students aren’t very mature and make poor decisions — everybody remember their “freshman 10?” Not to mention a few liaisons they probably regret?
This is one of those cases where making the mistakes early enough to recover from the dumb decisions is probably a good thing. 18 is a good compromise — old enough to actually know right from wrong again, young enough to survive the stupidity of doing wrong anyway.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
My older brother was in high school when the drinking age was 18. Kids in his class that were held back a year could legally drink mid-way through their Jr year in high school (that’s 11th grade). One kid…in 11th grade….used to go to a tavern at lunch time and have a couple of cocktails.