[DeltAlum]

You talk about confused...

My grandparents raised me in a fundamentalist Christian home where there was no drinking, card playing, dancing, movies on Sunday or even wearing of shorts.

On the other hand, I would go to a family reunion with my mom or dad (who were divorced) and there were kegs and all kinds of other "terrible" things.

At those reunions (which seemed to happen every weekend between the two families), the kids (like me) would make the trip between the adults and the kegs -- and, with the adults tacit approval, take a sip or drink off the foam on the way back. I'm talking young kids here -- eight or ten years old.

So, I liked beer. I don't understand why people who don't enjoy it try to "learn" to like it. Except, they want to be one of the crowd. But I digress. Yet again.

As I moved through high school and college, I drank. But I'll bet I can count on one hand the number of times I've been drunk. So, what does that mean? Nothing necessarily, except that in my case, since I had a fair amount of experience with alcohol, I never really felt I needed to experiment and get blasted all of the time. Maybe, (that's a big word, and I have absolutely no clinical proof) because I started out drinking in moderation at a young age, I built up a tolerance -- or at least understood my limits. Remember, I said "maybe."

IF (another big word), it's true, though, it would seem to me to back up the notion of lowering the drinking age at least some.

In terms of the statistics, as a number of very wise people have pointed out to me, "figures lie and Lyers figure." They're just too easy to manipulate.

So, what's my point? What does this prove? What's my thesus?

Beats me.

It's just a reason for my feeling that it wouldn't hurt to lower the drinking age back to eighteen -- at least for beer. Maybe if it weren't "the forbidden fruit," kids would take one drink, make the famous "stale beer face," yell "Yuck, this is awful!" and go do something else and not "learn to like it."