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(U-WIRE) (OKLAHOMA STATE) - Are you the kind of person who likes live music? How about the kind of person that likes to have a public place where you can visit with your friends to relax and socialize after 10 p.m.? What about the kind of person who likes to go out, but don't feel like paying all those high cover charges?
Well, are you the kind of person that is 21 or up? Because otherwise you are going to be hard-pressed to find a commercial place that fulfills any of these desires. If you don't already know, most of the live music in this town takes place behind the doors of the local taverns. Additionally, you are sure to find your social sphere limited by being left at the door at many places because you either have not found someone willing to lend you their birth certificate or you have not endured enough years to be worthy of entry. There is an age limit for such activity.
Now are you the kind of person who likes to drink? I am not talking about spring water, I mean the more fiery variety, the kind that burns all the way down and about as much coming back up? How about the kind of person that wants to throw back six, 12, 24 or 30 canisters of brew or 40 ounces of the malt stuff? You can find plenty of private persons and private residences that have set sail within the great alcohol sea that happens in a college town.
At 16, they let you drive a several-thousand-pound metal box anywhere you may please. When you're 17, you can go by yourself to see people cut into tiny pieces at any local movie theater. How about when you turn 18, you can now go to cut people into tiny pieces for your country. Now when you become 21, you can go into bars and clubs to see live music and lounge around plus buy liquor yourself from the store, which is something you couldn't do before, but alcohol is nothing new.
The "drinking age" is a miserable inconvenience that keeps more people from seeing local live music than it does keeping alcohol out of people's systems. Instead of putting people in situations where they can be watched in public by the professionals in charge of dispensing the alcohol this law encourages people to partake in private residences and locations where they are in the care of those with equally inebriate perceptions. The greatest crime is 18-year-olds leave home not knowing how to drink alcohol. Why do you think there is so much abuse at the college level? Freshmen come here, and for the first time mommy and daddy aren't waiting at home. So what does it matter if you come back to your residence with alcohol on your breath? These people end up in situations where alcohol is all around, yet the legal system forces them to learn the hard way how sick this stuff can make you. Really consider how occasional this law appears in light of a system that allows you to smoke, strip and vote at 18.
Why not lower the drinking age so while individuals are still in the care of their parents they can be taught how to properly drink. Parents are involved in their children's education in driving and politics, why not also in their children's understanding of drinking. Not just education in abstinence until the legally proscribed age, but in education in how to and where to drink. If drinking is such a moral issue, which we are so fond of legislating here in the U.S. (i.e. abortion,smoking, etc.) why not leave it to the family or church to instill the value instead of to Big Brother, who thinks it's all right to send you over seas to kill but not to sit in a bar to watch a band.
Legal adults should know before they leave home that a fifth of Old Crow in an hour is going to give you a new man to bow to. They should be able to participate on an equal footing with all Americans, because an 18-, 19-,and 20-year-olds vote counts as much as any one who is 21 or over. All you voters need to remember that you have a say about this law at 18 through 20. Think of all the benefits: increased honesty, more live music, equal cover charges, and it would also solve that problem of this idea of 21 at 21, instead it would be 18 at 18. The math comes to three less shots.