Where’s the line?

 Life, liberty and the pursuit of partying – these sound curiously close to the three “inalienable” rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

“Life” and “liberty” certainly match Jefferson’s document, but is the pursuit of “partying” a permissible substitution for the more general right to pursue happiness?

When partying becomes in college a raison d’etre, a reason for existence, students might well ask themselves what kind of dividends they can expect from beer and music.

Even when partying is kept in perspective with personal responsibilities, it can also encroach on others. 

What is a party? It is more of an atmosphere and attitude than an action, as I learned on a train from Cardiff, Wales back to Oxford one Saturday night. A loud group of college-aged boys were singing crazily in the railway station, waiting for the late train.

When it pulled up to the platform, they all piled into the last car and began weaving forward through the rest of the train, chanting the same old song. A while later, they were back, still stuck on the same song, but this time joined into a lively chain, with each one holding onto the shoulders of the fellow in front of him. They were carrying their fun with them.

In tailgating, fans carry a party along with them, too. Escaping the atmosphere of a home or the same old bar and setting up stakes in the outdoors creates a liberating atmosphere for a party.

As a parking attendant for IU football games, I have noticed, though, that when fans assert their right to pursue partying in a larger space than is proper, other fans are eventually squeezed into smaller corners of existence. Since louder music plus more beer plus later nights equals better partying in our culture, where does the line get drawn?

On my walk to church last Sunday morning, I noticed multiple beer pong tables overturned with their assorted contents scattered across lawns along Washington Street. Broken shards and bits of beer bottles strewn along some sidewalks and roads are also part of the after-effects of an unchecked pursuit of partying.

There was a time when students at Oxford would have been locked out of their college if they had not returned before 9 p.m., a rule that was not adjusted until the 1940s and not abolished until the 1960s. And “partying” in the dormitories would have been impracticable because of a rule that prohibited a dinner from being served in a student’s room for groups larger than four.

Even when students were outside their college walls, they were required to wear a distinctive cap and gown so university proctors could recognize them and keep track of their behavior.

I’m not by any means advocating a return to the 9 p.m. curfew, but I do wonder what Benjamin Franklin, a famed supporter of the Declaration of Independence, would have thought of the idea of the pursuit of “partying.”

In fact, in his list of 13 “necessary” moral virtues, the first item is temperance.