Oracle Online

According to Jim Kooler, an administrator of a California group “promoting healthy lifestyles,” “these drinks are a transitional beverage. They represent an insidious strategy to get teens comfortable with alcohol.”

Kooler’s comments say more about him than they say about alcoholic beverages. They situate him in a culturally specific worldview. Those who share this worldview have a paranoid need to protect others from the corrupting evils of the world, such as a bottle of Smirnoff Ice. It reflects authoritarian ideals; this is anti-democratic elitism at work.

People like Kooler are terrified that our “children” (more on this shortly) will actually attempt to find out for themselves what to make of alcohol, so Kooler and his authoritarian kind seek to control the choices of others.

It’s a similar logic and twisted morality to that which insists on inflicting youth with abstinence-only sex education. Sex is bad outside of a committed marriage, they say, therefore we must not do anything which could possibly be interpreted as encouraging sex-such as teaching youth how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Not only is this bad in that it attempts to coerce the behavior of others on the basis of religious belief, but it also fails miserably.

Trying to keep youth from having sex obviously fails miserably. Well, guess what? Trying to keep youth from drinking alcohol also fails miserably, and everyone knows it.

Ten million underage Americans drink alcohol, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. And our attempts to control the behavior of underage drinkers fuels the same drinking it seeks to prevent by making it more appealing.

Not only that, but it also actually discourages responsible drinking by forcing underage drinkers to consume alcohol in situations devoid of older, more experienced drinkers. Youth learn to drink entirely in the company of their peers instead. I started drinking unsupervised when I was 14; however, I had parents who allowed me a beer on occasion. This meant I had experience with alcohol, so I never drank myself stupid even when my peers did.

This is a hard concept for people like Kooler to grasp: there is nothing wrong with teens being “comfortable with alcohol.” The fear of people under 21 drinking alcohol stems from a culturally constructed idea of “childhood,” placed in opposition to this notion of “adulthood.”

These labels are a systematized way to disempower an entire category of people and construct them as passive objects to be controlled, molded, and protected according to the whims of “adults.”

It’s no small wonder that we think democracy means voting every two years, when we are taught from birth to subscribe to the idea that we are unable to make responsible decisions until we reach an age at which lawmakers say we can. This age, although bizarrely variableč16 to drive a car, 18 to smoke, vote, or potentially be forced to kill (and possibly die) for your country in a military draft, 21 to drink, and much younger to own a firearmčgenerally corresponds to the latter part of a long period of coerced passivity, sitting still in school while authority figures pour their wisdom into our apparently empty minds.

We aren’t allowed to have any meaningful control over our lives until it is certain that we can’t escape our socially (i.e. institutionally) constructed roles; in other words, until it is certain that we will exert that control in a way which preserves this hierarchy.

In this way, underage drinking can actually be a form of civil disobedience against a State which denies us the right to think and act for ourselves.

I am not advocating alcohol abuse any more than people arguing for free speech advocate hate speech. What I am advocating is the right of people to be allowed to make their own choices.