It sucks to be an American under age 21. I had forgotten that until I headed down to my local college town recently and was constantly under the scrutiny of the local police, who were asking my friends for ID and throwing them out of places where they're legally permitted. I'm not a kid, but I'm not an adult. In fact, I can get tossed into adult jail for participating in activities that are legal for adults. Chew on that one for a while. Heck, I've been told that I'm too stupid and immature to be responsible for my actions or pursue a lucrative career until I can no longer reliably bear healthy babies (average range of ages for women to neither incur injury during childbirth nor bear children with impariments or deformities: 15-28). At 18 I can buy guns, porno, explosives, tobacco, and poker chips AND I can pretend to contribute to the choosing of leaders, but I can't drink alcohol. Alcohol. The only "illicit" substance BLESSED BY THE CHRISTIAN GOD. In this nation where the Bible and Jaysus are used as reasons to lynch black people, repress women, terrorize people of different faiths, separate gays from basic human rights and tell kids that the instinctive procreative act known as SEX is BAD, you'd think we'd understand one of the Scripture's harder-to-rend verses such as "Jesus turned water into wine" to mean "wine isn't bad." Maybe I'm just a crazy liberal, but I can't figure out where we found notions like "prevent youths from doing what adults do on a regular basis so that they think activities such as drinking, sex, smoking, and guns are a lot cooler than they really are so that they abuse them when they finally are permitted to use them and wind up brain-damaged, pregnant, infected with STDs and possibly missing limbs before they've lived twenty-five years." Under a rock, maybe? Modern, Progressive thinking would rationalize that if you introduce activities such as these to kids when they're young and teach them the concept of moderation, we can have healthy, well-balanced, socially-productive people working and doing well for themselves as soon as they've gotten past puberty.
But until then, I'll drink and drive, have unprotected sex, and smoke until my lungs are black, then claim that I was simply too stupid to be expected to be responsible for my actions until I turned twenty-one.
Friday, September 03, 2004
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