The final frontier

Last night I turned 21. I went out, I took immense pride and satisfaction in pointing out to the bouncer who so rudely and ignorantly proclaimed, “This is an under-21 license” that I was indeed 21 and drank a whole lot of free booze. I even got a free T-shirt that reads “Hey! It’s my birthday!” It was, in a word, awesome. This was the final frontier, the last coming-of-age birthday that’s really any fun. All I have left to look forward to now is cheaper car insurance and the senior citizen’s discount.\nBut I don’t really feel more like an adult. For the past three years, I have watched my classmates and peers get married, have babies, accumulate credit card debt, move into their own apartments and even go off to Iraq. My 21st birthday, more than anything else, simply made it appropriate for me to drink a cocktail in front of my mother. In all reality, the drinking age in the United States is a mockery of American law and a display of our lawmakers’ illogical pandering to interest groups as well as the population at large. The United States is one of only four nations to implement a drinking age of 21 (the others are Mongolia, Indonesia and Palau). The only countries that have stricter laws than these follow Islamic Shariah law.\nMost lawmakers and others who support the current drinking age point to the sharp decrease in alcohol-related vehicular fatalities since the current legal age was raised to 21 during the ’80s. However, this likely had very little to do with the law. For one thing, the 18-21 demographic was shrinking as baby boomers grew up. Additionally, seatbelt use was very much on the rise (it was only 14 percent in 1984 – in 2004, 80 percent of drivers used seatbelts). But most importantly, a cultural shift was taking place, and we as a society were becoming aware that drinking and driving is problematic. Adults and friends’ parents have told me that in the 1980s, driving after drinking was just not really seen as a concern; people thought very little, if anything at all, of it. Even before the drinking age was raised, alcohol-related fatalities were already in a declining trend due to the simple fact that people were becoming much more aware of the dangers of alcohol.\nQuite frankly, our government took the easy way out and created a quick fix to appease a concerned population. The truth of the matter is that an 18-year-old who is entrusted by our nation with an M-16, or even a MasterCard, should be able to purchase beer at the supermarket. Similar fallacies in policy and public education can be cited almost endlessly, including our “War on Drugs” (surprisingly, marijuana is not the same as heroin, despite the fact that the government treats them that way) and the abstinence-only sex “education” of some schools that leaves teenagers clueless as to condom usage and birth control. We need a government that will create long-term solutions, such as accurate education, public advocacy and well-reasoned legislation, instead of policies that eventually do more harm than good but look nice on paper.