Why is the drinking age so arbitrary? I mean, I'm not rallying for it to be lowered, I'm just asking for a little consistency.
Think about it: You have to be twenty-one years old to drink alcohol in America. However, when you're eighteen, you can legally join the army, get married, have sex, smoke, gamble, be forced to pay taxes, live alone without a guardian, be tried as an adult, go to jail, get almost any job available to you, drive a car, and about a thousand other things. So why is it that the minimum age requirement for almost everything else that it's illegal for minors to do is three years younger than what it is to be able to drink?
Are those three years really going to make you any more responsible? Of course they aren't, that makes no sense! And besides everything else, nobody even pays attention to the law in the first place. Hell, we could just go back to the whole thing about safety regulations. I say let the parents decide when kids are ready to drink.
I mean, I realize it's extremely "Ayn Rand-ish" to basically say, "YOU'RE NOT MY FRIGGIN' MOM, GOVERNMENT!", but really now, I think it would be a great way to teach kids responsibility. Let them find out for themselves what a hangover is like. If they want to start drinking in fifth grade, who are we to stop them? It's their livers, let them destroy them.
How DARE you use the A.R. word. The mere mention of it makes me sick. I should hit you.
ReplyDeletebut yeah I agree with the whole drinking age thing. People are stupid, if they're only harming themselves, let them be stupid.
Maybe the drinking age should follow the example of getting a driver's license, a "permit" of sorts at 18 that would allow kids to drink in the presence of their legal guardian (although not actually a physical permit), and then full legal privilege at 21.
ReplyDeleteWisconsin used to be 18. Back when I was 18!! How conVEEEENient...anyway, they changed to 21 back when the Federal Gov't threatened to take away our highway funds. There has been no change whatsoever in drinking and driving accidents amongst under 21-year olds. We just had an 18 year old arrested for his SECOND drunk driving offense. Sad. All it has done is driven the under 21's "underground". There's more house parties and sneaking around etc. At least when it was 18 people were in the bars where there was actually supervision of sorts.
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