One of my heroes...
* * * * * *
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress
30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be
repealed.
(*STANDING OVATION*)
It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote,
marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an
alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States
apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive
countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab
Emirates.
* WELL... NOT REALLY FAIR TO THROW MUSLIM COUNTRIES IN
THE MIX...
Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who with all good intentions were wrongly
intruding into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing
19th-century Temperance crusaders, typified by Carrie Nation smashing beer
barrels with her hatchet.
Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14
years of Prohibition.
That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze
smuggling, laying the groundwork for today’s global drug trade. Thanks a lot,
Carrie!
Now that marijuana regulations have been liberalized in
Colorado...
* AN ISSUE I'M STILL ON THE FENCE ON... STILL GO BACK AND
FORTH ON...
...it’s time to strike down this dictatorial national
law.
* HEAR! HEAR!
Government is not our nanny. The decrease in
drunk-driving deaths in recent decades is at least partly attributable to more
uniform seat-belt use and a strengthening of DWI penalties. Today, furthermore,
there are many other causes of traffic accidents, such as the careless use of
cell phones or prescription drugs like Ambien – implicated in the recent trial
and acquittal of Kerry Kennedy for driving while impaired.
* JUSTICE IS OFTEN BLIND WHEN IT COMES TO THE RICH,
POWERFUL, AND LIBERAL.
Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in
growing up — as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its
family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own
Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s
home-made wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity. Beer was a
nourishing food in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and wine was identified with the life
force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (in wine, truth). Wine as a sacred
symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service.
Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and
subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”
* AND I'LL DRINK TO ALL OF THAT!
What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of
safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and
flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we
immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg
parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were
suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — Ecstasy, methamphetamine,
ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the
gay male circuit scene.
* FOLKS... THIS IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE! WE'VE ALL SEEN IT!
WE'RE ALL AWARE OF IT! WE NEED TO CORRECT THE 1984 MISTAKE!
Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas,
and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from
the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as
today’s massively over-prescribed anti-depressants, linger in body and brain and
may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often
manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent
uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres. Half of the urban professional
class in the U.S. seems doped on meds these days.
(*NOD*)
As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of
marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may
be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and willpower
and can produce physiological feminization in men.
* ARE YOU READIJNG THIS, FOLKS? I DON'T KNOW ABOUT "FEMINIZATION," BUT THIS ENERGY AND WILLPOWER THING...
(*SHRUG*)
* WHAT CAN I SAY? AM I AN ANTI-STONER DRUNK? YEAH... GUILTY AS CHARGED. A CULTURAL BIAS? AN IDEOLOGICAL BIAS? YEAH... SURE... BUT AS I WROTE ABOVE, I AM INDEED ON THE FENCE WITH EQUATING ALCOHOL USE WITH DRUG USE.
Also, it is difficult to measure the potency of
plant-derived substances like pot. With brand-name beer or liquor, however,
purchased doses have exactly the same strength and purity from one continent to
another, with no fear of contamination by dangerous street additives like PCP.
Exhilaration, ecstasy, and communal vision are the gifts
of Dionysus, god of wine. Alcohol’s enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue
is precisely what is needed by today’s technologically agile generation,
magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media.
Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple
hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive.
By undermining the art of conversation, the age 21 law
has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing
dullness and mediocrity. This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must
stop!
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