View Single Post
  #5  
Old 08-23-2004, 01:12 PM
ZTAngel ZTAngel is offline
Moderator
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: The beach
Posts: 7,952
I don't think the "uncontrolled freak like other youth" has to do as much with individual maturity as it does with societal factors. Plain and simple: American youth have more incidents with alcoholism and alcohol-related injuries/deaths then any other country in the world. Rather than it being that American youth have no maturity and are uncontrolled freaks, I think it's that we view alcohol as a forbidden fruit. The drinking age is 18 or 19 in most other countries; in many of those countries, the law is pretty lax and children in their teens have their first sips of wine with their parents. It's not like that here. We go into college away from the watchful eye of our parents and we're now around a bunch of people who are around our age. We join greek organizations and our big brothers/sisters are of legal age. I remember when I first joined ZTA how jealous I was of the older girls who could go out to all the bars and drink. It results in underagers getting fake IDs and drinking way over the limit since it is forbidden.

If the drinking age were lowered to 18, we wouldn't just have less problems in our greek organizations but we would have less problems in the country as a whole.

But, as for Greeks lobbying to lower the drinking age, I don't think that's such a good idea. We're already stereotyped as drunked, oversexed kids that live off their rich parents. Greeks lobbying to get the drinking age lowered would probably be almost humorous for some anti-Greeks.
__________________
ZTA
Reply With Quote