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Old Enough To Die, But Not To Drink

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By DANIEL RUTH

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 23, 2008

Updated: 08/23/2008 12:26 am

I come from a drinking family. I was raised in a drinking culture, the beer and bump blue-collar, middle-class, rubber-making heyday of Akron, Ohio.

I had my first drink in a soggy Boy Scout tent. It was a concoction of gin, vodka, whiskey and God only knows what else a fellow Tenderfoot had lifted from his parents' liquor cabinet. Whatever it was, I liked it.

In Ohio the drinking age was 21. We didn't care. Neither did the bartenders who served my classmates and me when we bellied up to the bar at 18.

You might say we freely broke the law. And I would say you are absolutely right.

In 1968, I arrived at Gannon University in Erie. Pennsylvania state law, too, mandated a 21-year-old limit to legally drink. About 15 miles away, across the New York State line, where Fredonia State University beckoned, the legal limit to imbibe was 18.

We preferred the New York law. And thus, long car caravans of students made that drive to Fredonia at night, often in blizzards.

Pride? What Pride?

Do you think I'm proud of this? No. But at the time, this had precious little to do with pride. We were college students. We were thirsty.

It would have been so much simpler, obviously safer and most certainly saner, if my classmates could have simply walked from our dorm to a saloon if we wanted to drink.

Pennsylvania's laws notwithstanding, we were going to do it anyway.

Some things, some generations, some antiquated laws never change.

Today, 21 is the national drinking age, but a group of pragmatic academics have created the Amethyst Initiative to jump-start a conversation on student sipping, hopefully leading to a more sensible 18-year-old limit for drinking.

To be sure, groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) vigorously oppose lowering the limit, arguing it will only encourage more irresponsible drinking.
Moral High Ground
No one would ever make the argument that drunken driving is a good idea. Clearly MADD has cornered the moral high ground on this point.

However, the Amethyst Initiative is made up of about 100 college presidents, including Duke, Dartmouth, Ohio State, Syracuse, Holy Cross, Colgate and Kenyon, who obviously have an intimate campus view of student drinking.

The argument of the Amethyst Initiative is that the current law isn't working, leading students to use fake IDs to evade the statutes, just like I did 40 years ago.

With all due respect to MADD, the reality is that if younger than 21-year-old students are going to drink, despite the law, isn't it a vastly better situation to have them do it legally, where greater school administration and peer pressure can be applied to create a responsible environment?

As well, there is the inescapable logic that if you are going to permit 18-year-olds the right to vote and, even more pointedly, allow them to enlist in the military where they could get killed, then surely they must be mature enough to toss back a Budweiser.

How surreal must it be for a 19-year-old U.S. Marine who has seen bloodshed in Iraq, to come home on leave and be told he can't have a drink?

Maddening, surreally maddening.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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