They are engaged in a great moral crusade out at Berekley. Damn you Budweiser!
Growing concerns about alcohol-related incidents have led the University of California, Berkeley, to enact a ban on alcohol consumption at all events hosted by campus fraternities and sororities, officials announced today (Monday, May 9).
The ban goes into effect immediately. It applies to all fraternities and sororities and all activities hosted by the campus's Greek community.
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The last time the campus banned alcohol in the Greek community was April 2002. That moratorium was limited to fraternities and sororities with chapter houses and to social events. A gradual lifting of that ban took place at the end of the fall 2002 semester as chapters demonstrated responsible actions at parties and other events.
UC Berkeley has 70 fraternities and sororities with more than 2,500 members. Under a current and longstanding campus policy, hard liquor is banned. Beer and wine are permitted for students of legal drinking age, but are prohibited if served from kegs or other bulk containers. In addition, all alcohol use is banned during fraternity and sorority recruitment weeks.
Obviously the laws of the state of California are not near good enough for the folks in the People's Republic. Lord knows how many other leagal activities they have deigned to ban, or will in the future.
Will there ever be a generation of people like the Baby Boomers again? I sure hope not. I'm not sure any nation could survive quite that much hypocrisy twice in it's history. They have gone from being "You don't have to live by YOUR laws, man" lefties to "Do as we say (not as we did)" oligarchs. They don't even have the simple common human decency to be abashed about the change.
I've often said that in dealing with alcohol our entire nation seems to be unable to learn from history. There have been prohibitionary schemes since colonial times and they have never succeeded in changing people behavior except for the worse. Yet such schemes keep coming back like some sort of Hydra, and often in the silliest of forms. For example, the prohibition against "hard liquor" but not beer and wine sounds exactly like the kind of thing you would expect to find in some quaint Victorian backwater circa 1880. That it exists as the law of the land in Berekeley today would be hysterical if it weren't so damn pathetic. Believe it or not it is just as possible to get blindingly drunk on Coors Light as it is drinking Cutty Sark. (Although why one would voluntarily ingest either of those beverages is beyond me...but thats a different issue.)
Now I don't have anything against Berekeley encouraging responsible behavior. The problems are A) We generally do not expect responsible behavior from younger folks so we tolerate more lower intensity bad behavior than we should, B) We overreact when something bad happens (e.g. an alcohol related death or violence) in a way that actually promotes further bad behavior by removing youth drinking from the public eye, and C) We ignore the fact our basic problems with alcohol stem from the terrible set of laws we have set up to govern the practice.
There is no ratonal explanation for setting up a system that encourages the development of 21-year-old kids who have no postive experiences with alcohol, who have no history of drinking responsibly, and who are treated as pseudo-adults even after they turn twenty-one. No wonder they keep acting like dumb children long after they should know better. Everything about our culture tells them that is normal.
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