Quote:
Originally posted by AGDee
As a parent, I often see my children make mistakes that I made and realized, in time, that they were mistakes. Just as you don't want to see your children make the same mistakes that you did, you don't want to see sisters/brothers make those mistakes either. It sometimes comes off as harshly judgmental, but I think that most of the time, it's a matter of "Why won't you learn from my(or other's) mistakes and not make them yourself?". The reality is, at those ages, the "It won't happen to me" attitude is alive and well. Us old folks get frustrated with that and don't know how to express "It CAN happen to you", knowing it's going to fall on deaf ears anyway. We end up sounding like we're attacking as a result. (Not justifying, just trying to explain the mentality behind it).
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Not to get all philosophical here, but I don't think the issue is so much that college kids don't think that they could ever die from drinking too much. Of course we all know that there's the off-chance that binge-drinking could kill us. There's also the much more likely chance that you're going to have a good time (maybe followed by spending your night throwing up and the next day feeling terrible) and most of us are willing to take that chance.
For all the times when Power Hour/Century Club/Beirut/keg races/WHATEVER goes wrong, there are also a million times where it goes fine and everybody has fun or at least doesn't die or get sexually assaulted or get their sorority put on probation for a year or even get sick.
And no, that doesn't mean that it's "responsible." But that also doesn't mean that nobody should ever play drinking games just because something MIGHT go wrong. I've done Century Club. I've played drinking games with football players. Was that necessarily smart? Maybe not. Was it "responsible"? No. But I'm not sure why responsible has to be the be-all-end-all of college life. Or life in general. Taking risks is a part of life.