Chi Psi Colorado Proceeds

[Tom Earp]

While all may be true to a point, the parents of most kids who can afford to go to college today can also be found at fault.

Parents are one of two ways.

Either coddle kids and give anything they want or do not give nothing to them and the kids are either used to getting their way or are rebelling against them.

When they get to college, they want to do what they want to do. So is it the School or the GLOs responsibility to baby sit over them?

So, where does the problem stem from?

Kids going to school now do not like to live in rooms with one or more people. Kids are used to having cable, phone, and lots of plug ins just like home!

It seems it has become a "ME" attitude society.

Schools are changing dorms, new GLO houses are being built the same way.

Our new house has all of the above with 2 to a room and a common shared bathing area for another room!

Figure the cost of building a new house now!

PSU, KS. not counting the land was 3/4 Million! The New LXA House.

[macallan25]

Originally Posted by Tom Earp

While all may be true to a point, the parents of most kids who can afford to go to college today can also be found at fault.

Parents are one of two ways.

Either coddle kids and give anything they want or do not give nothing to them and the kids are either used to getting their way or are rebelling against them.

When they get to college, they want to do what they want to do. So is it the School or the GLOs responsibility to baby sit over them?

So, where does the problem stem from?

Kids going to school now do not like to live in rooms with one or more people. Kids are used to having cable, phone, and lots of plug ins just like home!

It seems it has become a "ME" attitude society.

Schools are changing dorms, new GLO houses are being built the same way.

Our new house has all of the above with 2 to a room and a common shared bathing area for another room!

Figure the cost of building a new house now!

PSU, KS. not counting the land was 3/4 Million! The New LXA House.

Tom, its 2007......cable, "plug ins" and a phone are pretty much a requirement. I've had plenty of classes that heavily utilized online resources, email, tv programming etc. Utilizing available technology doesn't mean we are a self absorbed "me" society.

Also, I think your discription of parenting today is rather off base. Basically you are saying that parents either give their kids everything or treat them like crap, hence they either get their way all the time or basically hate their parents. Tom........that is absolutely ridiculous and I honestly don't think you would actually believe that that is the way it is.

[UGAalum94]

I was going with the "waited 10 hours" to get the guy help as support for the let him die.

I was really stating what I thought ought to be the case, rather than trying to say anything about what was legally true.

I think we need to go back more to individual responsibility for our actions. As a society, we're letting people shift blame on to others too much.

As a individual member of a GLO, I don't think the members of the group behaved in a moral and ethical way if the account from the paper is accurate. It seems really strange and sad to me that only major lawsuits and criminal charges are considered motivating in keeping groups from acting this way. The main reason that you don't let members drink themselves to death shouldn't be your insurance policy.

On the other hand, this was group that the guy freely chose to be associated with, and I suspect he knew kind of what was going to happen to him that night (except for his death, of course), and he went along with it. My guess is that he took health in high school and may have even had seminars and classes in colleges about the dangers of alcohol. People should have been looking out for him, and one of the people is the guy himself.

There were a lot of things that could have happened differently and the guy would still be alive; one of the most straightforward would have been his choosing not to go or not to drink. He paid for that decision with his life, but I'm still not sure that makes the other guys responsible for his death. (But I'm still thinking it through.)

[EE-BO]

Tough call here.

Going to college and being independent was the most awesome feeling in my life. That is until I pledged my fraternity. I still care deeply for it, but back then it was perhaps the most important thing to me as a pledge and new active.

With age, even during college, it took its proper place in my life- but I expect for most of us, the pledge period and a bit beyond was a time when fraternity had a value and importance that will rarely happen again in a person's lifetime.

So I do not see it as a matter of why this young man did not resist peer pressure or receive better parenting. If he was drinking in a bar with friends and died- sure, I could buy that.

But this was something different. The purpose of a pledge period and any hazing- and by hazing I do not mean the legal definition which includes criminal activity but also the more common acts which are not strictly illegal but still beyond voluntary- is the same as it in in any ritual in life.

When you start a new job, you get hazed. When I started in public accounting, I got "hazed" a bit. And I passed it on good too. I had an intern call a senior manager at home at 11 PM to get a box of tickmarks Fed-Exed over the next day (a tickmark, for you non-accountants, is just a symbol written next to a number to indicate it was traced to another document, verified etc. There is no such thing as a box of tickmarks.)

The hazing process in all walks of life is, I think, a simple human reaction. It is having a bit of fun, but at the same time encouraging the trust of a newcomer. You have some fun with them, and in the process that person becomes part of the group. It is a basic element of human interaction.

However, the great responsibility lies with the group to ensure that the newcomer is not killed or seriously injured. This is supposed to be fun and games with a real goal.

Assuming the news reports are accurate, this was well beyond what I would consider acceptable.

And while that young man may have been an "adult", it is kind of hard to expect him to act like an adult when he was surrounded by a LOT of other people of similar age who were not acting in any way like adults.

I absolutely deplore hazing incidents involving forced alcohol intake. There is no excuse for it- ever. And in all my experience and observation with hazing incidents, alleged rapes at parties, deaths and other serious accidents- alcohol is the overwhelming common thread in many cases.

Young men and women drinking to excess voluntarily is a fact of life 50 years ago, now and forever- both in and out of fraternities.

But forced drinking is another thing entirely. And while this lawsuit may seem a bit extreme and illogical to some, how logical is it for a young man to be isolated and pushed/forced to drink (we will never know the answer to that) and then left to die when he was obviously in trouble?

While the men charged probably did not fully think out their actions in advance- "not thinking" has never been a valid defense in court for anything to my knowledge.

[valkyrie]

Originally Posted by EE-BO

When you start a new job, you get hazed.
<snip>
The hazing process in all walks of life is, I think, a simple human reaction. It is having a bit of fun, but at the same time encouraging the trust of a newcomer. You have some fun with them, and in the process that person becomes part of the group. It is a basic element of human interaction.

Wait, what?! I've never been hazed at a job (or anywhere else for that matter). I'm sure it happens, but definitely not everywhere.

Maybe hazing is a basic element of human interaction in some circles -- but not in others. Personally, I think that anything to do with hazing (doing the hazing or being hazed) is a huge sign of weakness and incredibly pathetic -- it's outside my reality sphere, just like it's inside yours.

[EE-BO]

When you started a new job, did anyone ever play a little joke on you? That would be a form of hazing.

For example, an irate customer calls in and someone forwards it to you on your first day. Or someone hides something of yours and later gives it back.

Granted it does not exist everywhere- all depends on the environment. I have worked at places where I would not even consider kidding around with anyone, and some places we loved to play jokes on each other. A lot of what deemed acceptable depends on the environment and I think people's own behavior will change to adapt (or they will find another environment where they are more comfortable.)

Or when you are the new kid in school and you get picked on- and whether you are later accepted is due in part to how you react to that. Do you shrug it off and go with it, or do you run to teacher and tattle.

Hazing is a part of life. The word hazing has come to be associated with more extreme forms- and the word is most commonly used in association with unacceptable forms or after a tragedy has happened. But that is not its true meaning.

I make that point just because I think it affects any discussion had on this particular board on the forum.

It matters because it explains why some kids can get drunk, and with impaired judgement do something like this. Some people who haze hard may get some sadistic or erotic pleasure out of it, but for the vast majority of people this is simply a natural human behavior.

Alcohol combined with an environment in which more dangerous hazing practices are a norm within that group is where you run into trouble I think.

And that is what I think happened here- and what I think happens in many cases.

Whether the lawsuit is the right move is hard to say- but only because it is so unimaginable that this whole thing happened.

When I was in college, a lot of us pushed our limits- but whether you were a pledge or a brother, there were always people in the room keeping watch and trying to keep things getting out of hand. They would be drunk too sometimes of course, and so that intervention was not what it should have been.

But I was never witness in my Greek life to anything that involved forced alcohol consumption or even anything that could be construed as such. I really mean that. It is hard to know in a he-said, she-said kind of situation, but in this case if the allegations prove true that guys were drinking while blindfolded and/or in a very isolated setting, it is going to be very hard to convince a reasonable person it was voluntary. The first question is, if this was not so bad- why did it have to take place well out of sight of the rest of the world? If the chapter was afraid to do whatever they were doing in the house behind closed doors, just how can they say these charges are not worth exploring in trial?

Camping out and partying is fun- been there done that. But all the allegations in this case point to something far beyond a situation where people had the voluntary ability to do themselves an injury.

I am a lot more open-minded about "hazing" than many on this forum, but forced drinking is one place where I draw a very hard line. In the long run, the kind of environment that permits that is headed for disaster.

And not just for the victim. What about the guys charged? I am willing to bet they meant no real harm- but even if no charges were filed they have to live with this for the rest of their lives. And so do their fraternity brothers who will wonder "what could I have done to stop this?"

Laws and IHQ regulations are somewhat vague for good reason in my opinion. But there are very clear boundaries beyond which nobody wins or has any real reason to cross the line, and this incident crossed a big one.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by EE-BO

But I was never witness in my Greek life to anything that involved forced alcohol consumption or even anything that could be construed as such. I really mean that. It is hard to know in a he-said, she-said kind of situation, but in this case if the allegations prove true that guys were drinking while blindfolded and/or in a very isolated setting, it is going to be very hard to convince a reasonable person it was voluntary.

I am a lot more open-minded about "hazing" than many on this forum, but forced drinking is one place where I draw a very hard line. In the long run, the kind of environment that permits that is headed for disaster.

And not just for the victim. What about the guys charged? I am willing to bet they meant no real harm- but even if no charges were filed they have to live with this for the rest of their lives. And so do their fraternity brothers who will wonder "what could I have done to stop this?"

I realize that this may reflect a deep flaw in my thinking, but some of what you are saying is why I think that it might not have gone down exactly as described. The fact that nobody else died also works against the idea that all new members were forced to drink.

I can see the setting out in the wood as some kind of bonding thing, weird as it might be; I can even think of the blindfolds as a test of trust or some junk like that, but I can't really wrap my head around the idea that you could force a bunch of guys to drink that much and only one guy would get hurt.

It also blows my mind that anyone could come of age today and not know that drinking too much can kill you.

[Tom Earp]

Originally Posted by macallan25

Tom, its 2007......cable, "plug ins" and a phone are pretty much a requirement. I've had plenty of classes that heavily utilized online resources, email, tv programming etc. Utilizing available technology doesn't mean we are a self absorbed "me" society.

Also, I think your discription of parenting today is rather off base. Basically you are saying that parents either give their kids everything or treat them like crap, hence they either get their way all the time or basically hate their parents. Tom........that is absolutely ridiculous and I honestly don't think you would actually believe that that is the way it is.

mac, I respectfully disagee with you.

I see many people daily who are going through the same thing I mentioned. These are people with children so that is why I mentioned it.

Kids today who can afford to go to college are used to many things and expect it. That is why when we just built our new house, it included all of the finer things of life except they are 2 person rooms as far as all of then hook ups..

I have to agree with EE-BO!

They want to be a part of something that are not run by parents and prove that they can make decissions wrong or right, they want to be who they are and follow those they think they may be able to trust.

Now, it is up to those who are supposed to be in that possition to be trusted.

Is that not an act of Faith and Hope or Stupidity?

[macallan25]

Originally Posted by Tom Earp

mac, I respectfully disagee with you.

I see many people daily who are going through the same thing I mentioned. These are people with children so that is why I mentioned it.

Kids today who can afford to go to college are used to many things and expect it. That is why when we just built our new house, it included all of the finer things of life except they are 2 person rooms as far as all of then hook ups..

I have to agree with EE-BO!

They want to be a part of something that are not run by parents and prove that they can make decissions wrong or right, they want to be who they are and follow those they think they may be able to trust.

Now, it is up to those who are supposed to be in that possition to be trusted.

Is that not an act of Faith and Hope or Stupidity?

Thnanks for youwer inpiut.............asjdfhasld;fhasdfiohasfoailshdf ;lashdf;ldashfasld;kfhas;lkdfkfas;lkdfjaslfd. CALL NATIONAL:S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

I WIWEHRS YOU WOULD FALL
OF AAA CLUFF AND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Tom Earp]

Originally Posted by macallan25

Thnanks for youwer inpiut.............asjdfhasld;fhasdfiohasfoailshdf ;lashdf;ldashfasld;kfhas;lkdfkfas;lkdfjaslfd. CALL NATIONAL:S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

I WIWEHRS YOU WOULD FALL
OF AAA CLUFF AND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Typical for your type of posting.

Wishing bad upon people as you do will be paid back. Sounds like one of your bestest of cronies.

You could be a great Greek Member of Greek Organizations---!