'Learn' to drink? Poppycock!

 

I don’t know what it is about this society that thinks everybody needs to “learn” to drink. It’s simple: you pour the booze, mix it with something if you like, add some ice and you drink. Then you get in your car, drive down the road, impaired, and kill somebody.

 

I have never seen anything good come from drinking an alcoholic beverage. Yes, I drank some as a young woman but as I grew older I began to wonder why. It just made me sleepy and loud and made me say things I regretted later. Good time? Hah! Being hung over the next morning would hardly qualify as a good time.

 

Why would sane parents give permission for their children to drink? Aside from being against the law, children who drink don’t have the maturity to know when to stop. That maturity comes with age. And forget this noise about being “old enough to fight but not old enough to drink.” The two have nothing to do with each other.

 

Families have been broken, children have been neglected or left without one or fewer parents, people have been destroyed, property has been damaged or destroyed, disease has attacked bodies—resulting in funerals—all for the love of alcohol. I could say the same for cigarettes, except that with cigarettes the process is drawn out over many years. Booze can make it happen instantly.

 

Alcohol is not necessary to have a good time. In no way is it worth a hangover the next morning. I also used to smoke, and did for many years, quitting only a few years ago. Fortunately my ills today have less to do with cigarettes than with genetics.. But at least no one has ever smoked a cigarette and gotten in their car and killed themselves or somebody else.

 

To parents who want to “teach” their children to drink at home: you are turning your child into a potential alcoholic. No one has ever become an alcoholic who has never taken that first drink. Remember that, you teenagers who can’t wait until the legal drinking age.

 

It’s unfortunate that I had to be in my 40s before I learned the alcohol lesson and in my 60s before I learned the cigarettes lesson. I wish the rest of the world would learn sooner. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way human nature works.