p00frog

18-year-olds are responsible enough to vote, to enlist in the military and to marry without parental consent … but not old enough to drink?

It sounds like a righteous argument – but is it really?

First, we must consider that these comparisons don’t even play ball in the same field. 18-year-olds don’t poison their bodies by voting too many times (as I understand it, your vote only counts once, doesn’t it? In some states, even if you’re dead)

Enlisting in the military is a serious commitment sometimes requiring weeks of counsel.

A game of beer pong may last 15 minutes.

And marriage, though it can also be jumped into without much thought (does “we were drunk” sound familiar?), is at least a commitment arranged by two, hopefully consenting, parties. And if alcohol does turn out to be a contributing factor in a shotgun wedding, the marriage can always be annulled (see: Britney weds in Las Vegas).

I could go dig up some research that spouts how many people have died as a result of underage drunken drivers – but such arguments have never appealed to me. Last time I used statistics as a foundational argument I was called names and banished from the playground by the other third graders. They didn’t like my presentation on how, statistically speaking, 24 cats probably did their business in the sandbox the night before.

“The very sand you currently have your hands in,” I told the young, naïve ears perking up at me, “has been, at some point or another, pooped in, on or around; if not by the neighborhood cats, then by Jill Macintosh.” (Jill was known around the playground to be portentously overblown.)

They then proceeded to throw some mysteriously-held-together clumps of sand at me. To this day I have not fully recovered.

But if I don’t use statistics, what then? Consider that myself, and my associates, were all at one time 18 years of age. Then consider the foolish things we did at 18 (too many to list here), and you are essentially left with a lopsided argument in favor of the current law.

Unless 18-year-olds have grown incredibly more mature in the few years since I was 18 – it is in our country’s best interest to keep the [legal] drinking age at 21.

I will, however, grant one exception. That exception being if an 18-year-old can stand in line at the DMV by themselves without any parental supervision, successfully pass a field sobriety test administered by the office clerk while sober (that’s you, not the clerk); the aforementioned, upon successful completion, will thereby be granted a 3 year stipulation in excess of his or her current age at the time of testing, thus rendering any law void and obsolete.

We all know those dagum field sobriety tests are impossible to pass anyway. Let’s utilize them to their fullest potential, fool the 18-year-olds into thinking there is hope for their cause, and we can go on being the responsible, over-the-legal-age citizens that we are.

Now pass me a beer – I have election coverage I need to catch up on.