A month ago I went to a bar in Madison with my mother and uncle while we were in town to see Hair, during which I poured my heart out about youth rights over loud energetic jazz and college students talking. We discussed a number of things, the biggest topics being education because my mother is a high school spanish teacher and my uncle is an english professor. My uncle was very engaged because he once taught classes on youth culture and could understand more of what I was talking due to him knowing more about it. To engage my mother, I brought up the Amethyst Initiative–we watched a segment about it on 60 Minutes together–and we went from there.
I once told my mother during the watching of the previously mentioned segment that she couldn’t necessarily stop me from drinking if I had picked it up. I also said, this time jumping back to the bar with my uncle, that if a kid starts drinking or having sex or whatever, that if they started their parents couldn’t necessarily stop them from doing it either: they’d just find a new way to keep it underground, and that worried me. But how he responded gave a very interesting insight on how people mature in this kind of a society.
You see, this topic prompted a discussion of how teenagers get drugs, –whether they go to a medicine cabinet in their own house or they take a weirder route, like wetting tampons with alcohol and shoving them up their asses–and my uncle then began to say that these behaviors — underage drinking, sex, and risky behavior in general — showed that maturity to many youths was now associated with self-destruction rather than responsibility. I praised him very audibly at the time, and still think about it to this day.
Primarily, I think it’s a very telling explanation of how young people can be portrayed to be so stupid by society. Most people see youths drinking, getting involved in having sex with each other or someone older, or even just staying out a bit late and they think they’re just destroying themselves, society, or are just plain old up to no good. To the young people actually doing these acts, they’re just rebelling, often having fun in the process. The huge problem with this rebellion, mostly in the case of drinking, is that it can become a problem, and the only reason it would is due to lack of parental involvement. But because they’re doing it anyway, despite what the law says, what society says, and, most importantly, what their own parents say, they are just thought of as stupid, punished, and left at that.
In that punishment they may be taken away from alcohol for a while, but they’ll still find more and keep drinking anyway. They live until they are at an older age where drinking is legal for them now, but they’ve never really been informed about their drinking, besides that it is a destructive activity no matter how they do it. Drinking is a destructive behavior, so it is somewhat believable, but definitely not in moderation. Still, they’re now drinking because they’re addicted anyway and can’t stop themselves. Let’s say they die somewhere outside of their home, say in a bathroom at a bar, and when the media catches wind of it they have a field day about how disturbing it is. Then the media interviews people close to this person and learn that this person has always had a drinking problem, and from such a young age of all things! It is a assured that there will be a note in the article about how legislation is getting tougher on underage drinking and how great it is that we have such protections for our future policemen and politicians. How wonderful contemporary western society is!
But they don’t see the real story! They don’t see that the only thing that had to happen was for this person’s parents to teach them simple responsibility and they could’ve drank for the rest of their lives and nobody would ever see a problem in this person. Still, it just can’t be that way for mainstream society. It’s much easier to stick to how things are and work with that rather than trying something new and seeing if it works; it’s easier to hate than to love.
