Hiding behind a bottle

What makes a person call someone else a faggot? What inspires someone to provoke a total stranger with deprecating racial epithets? What instills that hatred, and furthermore, what encourages someone to vocalize it?

While an individual’s capacity to hate can spawn from many social and cultural circumstances, there is one pathetic explanation that is nothing more than a whimpering excuse: “I was drunk.”

Just as voluntary intoxication cannot be used as a defense for rape, being in a Jager-induced stupor is no excuse for hate speech. While alcohol doesn’t necessarily coerce you into honesty, it certainly doesn’t force you to spew highly offensive fabrications.

I’m sure many of you may be shocked to hear this, but alcohol is actually proven to lower the drinker’s inhibitions. This can lead to increased confidence, increased potential for physical harm and increased scenarios of someone getting peed on. But the point to take home is this: You are not a different person when drunk – you are only an extension of yourself.

Whatever you say or do while intoxicated is ultimately connected to who you truly are. Someone hits on a girl because they want to get laid, someone starts a fight because they want to prove they’re tough and someone delivers a drunken sermon of hate because, on some level, that is how they feel.

I have a friend who recently witnessed a drunken student on the bus ranting about “effing faggots” to his fellow inebriated cronies. Did the same fermented forces, which might compel others to drunk dial an ex, manage to plant foreign ideas of homophobia into this poor student’s helpless mind?

The answer is no. Those feelings were already there, waiting to be coaxed out of the magic lamp of sobriety.

Take, for instance, the Mel Gibson incident. In 2006, Gibson was pulled over for driving under the influence and told the arresting officer that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” He also called a female sergeant “sugar tits.”

Gibson, who in recent photos ironically resembles a bearded rabbi, later made the obligatory public apology, in which he accredited his derogatory comments to the mind-warping effects of alcohol.

But if anti-Semitism was the last thing on Gibson’s mind, then why did he display it?  Why not drunkenly blurt out the lyrics to “Come On Eileen” or compare the police officer to Joe Pesci’s character in “Lethal Weapon 3?” Yet instead of behaving like an idiot, Gibson behaved like a bigoted idiot and resorted to generic hate-speech.

The modern world is saturated with hatred, and even IU, a supposed oasis of acceptance, cannot fully jettison that hate.

Racism, sexism and homophobia are all alive. Sometimes they reveal themselves without prompting; other times it takes a little liquid encouragement.

If you’re cowering behind a bottle, take responsibility for what you do and say.

Excuses won’t fool anybody, and sooner or later, those excuses will stop fooling you.