Driving to a friend's house off-campus during the first week of school this year, my travelling companion and I were accosted at a stop sign.
"Here we go again," the reader may sigh. "Another instance of a student complaining that the townies are scary."
The catch is, we were on-campus, and the young man who confronted us seemed to be a student (I didn't ask for I.D.).
I had been just about to turn onto College Avenue from the parking lot beside the LFC, when I had to slow my car to a crawl to avoid injuring the crowd of students spreading across my path. They eventually allowed a gap to form that seemed big enough to drive through.
I was about to pull out on to the road when I heard a shout and saw a hand reach out and grab my driver's side mirror. The guy who did the grabbing was a stranger to me, and I doubt I could identify him again: he was just another Friday night drunk at WC.
He half-steadied, half-supported himself on my mirror and started trying to sweet-talk his way into the car for a ride to a party downtown.
He slurred, I demured, and his friends eventually convinced him to go away.
The incident took less than two minutes, but it illustrates a question I haven't been able to get out of my mind since I began to hear reactions to the Cannon St. fight a few weeks ago.
Forget hostile C-town residents.
Who's going to save us from ourselves?
The violence a few weeks ago was shocking, but what about the injuries that occur every weekend as a result of student drinking?
And what about our diginity?
Bucking the prevalent "nudge-nudge, wink-wink, kids will be kids" attitude when it comes to college drinking makes me feel like a jerk sometimes. I'm a senior who is rapidly approaching my twenty-first birthday, and instead of pre-ordering a keg like I'm supposed to, I'm shaking my finger at what passes for light-hearted collegiate antics around here and plotting ways to spoil the fun.
I sure am.
I'm tired of the drinking culture at WC. Even elsewhere in the pages of today's Elm, you'll see casual references to alcohol as everything from a crutch for the socially awkward to the most desirable ingredient for a party.
Any weekend, an observer can watch students stumbling around making fools of themselves or vomiting. Students here periodically require medical treatment for alcohol poisoning, and even among those of us who haven't had any scares that dramatic, there are large numbers who know what it's like to wake up incapacitated with a raging hangover. If those symptoms came from a rogue strain of bacteria, we would panic. As it is, we chalk it up as a part of the college experience.
Almost without realizing it, I've spent three years and the beginning of a fourth as a WC student, and my major regret is that there's so much of my time here I'll never be able to remember. Beyond that, there were all kinds of things I could have been doing. I'm not blaming the school or any other institution for my past decisions, but I think that the widespread assumption that college kids are going to drink anyway, and that it's somehow funny or cute amounts to nothing less than tacit encouragement.
Every now and then there's a half hearted reminder that drinking one's self into a stupor might have consequences. A sticker in my dorm's bathroom last year read, "Face it: alcohol affects your ability to think clearly." I giggled every time I saw it. Why did they think people drank, anyway? To beef up their IQ's?
It eventually disappeared, either at the hands of an angry tippler or as another specimen in someone's collection of ironic kitsch.
I'm not saying the school should make our decisions for us, or that it has a responsibility to control our behavior. I'm saying that as students, we have the means to sit and think about our own actions. We can figure out other ways to live. We can avoid the hype.
Most of all, we can give ourselves the chance to remain clearheaded and respect ourselves in the morning.
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