Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

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Drinking should be for the miserable

I was stunned to see that the leaders of more than 100 colleges and universities across the country (including at least one in Hawaii) are in favor of lowering the minimum age for drinking alcohol. I'm against college students being allowed to drink before they reach age 21 because I'm basically against college students having fun. And I thought that the heads of colleges all over the country were with me on that.

I know, a lot of people think college students should be able to have fun as a way of relieving the stress of having to study so hard. They say, so what if a 19- or 20-year-old engineering major wants to have a couple of beers on the weekend? But these are people who clearly are not paying for a kid to go to college. When you're footing the bill for college, you aren't paying for that kid to have fun. You want that kid to spend every waking moment studying hard so he/she can get a good high-paying job so he/she will be able to keep you in the kind of luxurious retirement to which you hope to become accustomed. You know that isn't going to happen, but you can still hope.

So why are all these college presidents and chancellors so hot to make their students happier by letting them legally drink at a younger age? I thought the job of these leaders was to figure out how to make students' lives more miserable. When I was in college, that seemed to be the case. I mean, I went to a college whose president insisted that classes start at 8 in the morning. What kind of insanity was that?

I got back at him by making billiards my first class of the day. Seriously. It was a one-credit physical education class. At 8:30 a.m. my classmates and I would be down at the student activities center shooting eight ball and throwing back shots of Wild Turkey with packs of Marlboros wrapped up in our white T-shirt sleeves like Marlon Brando. We played pool in the same building that housed the bowling alley. And there'd be students in bowling class at 8:30 in the morning while we shot pool. What kind of losers bowl at 8:30 in the morning?

Playing pool that early isn't fun, but it beats algebra.

We could legally drink at that time in Hawaii at age 18 because it looked like we were all going off to Vietnam to die. We all had draft numbers. Being able to drink at 18 isn't as fun as you think it is when you know in a few months you might be in Da Nang getting shot at.

I'd only be in favor of lowering the drinking age if everyone under 21 who drinks might have to go fight in Iraq. Like, when you buy a six-pack of beer or bottle of Wild Turkey, you are given a War Lottery Ticket. You scratch off the ticket and it either says "Party!" or "Baghdad!" That way, today's college kids won't be so eager to drink, and it will make Mom and Dad happy that they're miserable.