Look, whether or not underage drinking, or having a drinking age in the first place, is or should be legal/moral/whatever is one thing. It’s certainly a topic on which reasonable people can disagree. Let’s not lose sight, though, of the statement that earned Diogenes this Pitting in the first place, namely that minors should be punished for being at a party where drinking is occuring, even if they aren’t drinking.
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. Let’s punish people who DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG! That way, we can teach them what will happen if they ever DID do anything wrong! That ought to scare them enough to keep them from doing it! It’s a preventative measure! In fact, let’s send ALL the kids to jail for a night, whether they went to a kegger or not! That will show them! I mean, hell, as long as we’re punishing people who DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG just to teach them a lesson, why be picky? Isn’t the lesson that “Jail Sucks” equally applicable to everyone? And clearly, they haven’t figured it out for themselves, given that they’ve engaged in the horrible act of NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG!
But wait, says Diogenes! The two situations are not analogous! Sure, in both situations, the person in question DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG, but in the first one, he was in the presence of people who were doing something wrong! Obviously, people who are NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG within an X-foot proximity of people who are something wrong are doing something wrong, regardless of whether they’re doing anything wrong or not! Confused yet? Diogenes isn’t…or at least, that’s what he’d have you believe!
Seriously, Dio, if you honestly advocate this position, I cannot fathom your personal moral code. Let’s cast aside for the moment the (pretty fucking significant) ethical misconduct involved in punishing people who were not only not only doing anything wrong, but in fact consciously resisting both peer pressure and ample opportunity TO do something wrong given their environment. Let’s focus only on the pragmatic angle, which is the authoritarian’s stock in trade. You do realize that, under this system, you’ll be teaching these kids one thing and one thing alone: when (not if) you go to a social gathering where drinking ends up occurring, and it gets busted by the police, you’re gonna go to jail whether you were drinking or not. So…want a beer?
For what it’s worth, I’m 20, and the most alcohol I have ever consumed was a sip of beer given to me by my dad when I asked him what it tasted like. This is a conscious choice on my part; while I don’t have any moral objections to drinking (I believe it to be a personal decision), I simply don’t like feeling loss of control over my own actions. It would’ve been easy enough to drink had I wanted to do so; by the time I was 16, neither of my parents would’ve given a damn as long as I only did it at home, and my stepdad used to try to get my to have a beer with him regularly. I have been to numerous “parties” (more like little get-togethers, really; I don’t like wild-n’-crazy gatherings) where underaged drinking has been going on, and nothing bad has ever come as a result, either for me, or for anyone involved. Your insistance that I have some obligation to call the cops on my own friends, who are having two beers and sleeping over and driving nowhere and hurting nobody, is enough to merit a big fat “fuck you”.
But your assertion that I ought to face legal prosecution for choosing not to engage in underaged drinking simply because my friends made the choice to do so, and I made the choice not to actively shun them because of it…it moves beyond the scope of my vocabulary of profanity. Even the mighty “I would tell you to suck my cock, you fucking goat-felching douchebag son of a motherless whore, were it not that your shit-spewing tongue is not fit to lick the mold from the fetid scrotum of a leper’s rotting corpse”, falls well short of the mark here. Nonetheless, I trust I am understood.
From the constant stream of anti-Bush flames coming from the blowtorch of his keyboard in the days surrounding the election, I mistook Diogenes for a liberal. You will, of course, forgive me for my temporary insanity, if indeed this is the sort of position he generally takes.