Eat, Drink and Be Reasonable…

By Sarah Bier
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
KOC Assistant Editor

What is about alcohol that we relish so much? Many restaurants host more variety on their alcohol menus than their food offerings. New year’s celebrations and fourth of July barbeques offer a plethora of options. Even when it comes to Jewish holidays, excitement over the supposed rabbinic directive to get trashed on Purim and Simhat Torah elicits greater student involvement.

But more than anything, what’s the American obsession with the number 21? I just stepped over the thresh from 20, and in the weeks leading up to the big day, I can’t guess how many times I was asked about my plans for partying. Not that I didn’t, don’t get me wrong; the amount of alcohol I consumed in that twenty-four hour period was significantly greater than my usual quantity of nada. But I just don’t understand the near obsession college students have with the liquid.

I am half English and have spent a lot of time in Europe and billed the occasional beer to random rooms’ tabs at the tender age of fourteen. Legally, in England the drinking age is eighteen, though few pubs check. In mainland Europe there’s even less of an attempt to withhold alcohol from minors. While kids can go out drinking far younger there than here, they also don’t have the same fascination with getting drunk as we do. You might feel inclined to blame this primarily on the Europeans’ backwardness, but the truth is that this breeds a far healthier approach to drinking than we have here. Because it’s not as strictly prohibited, people don’t want it as much. There are fewer drunk-driving incidents – maybe because kids can only begin driving at seventeen – but also because it is normal to drink wine with dinner and responsibility is taught with each sip.

While I was visiting England over my university’s break, my friend asked what in the world we could possibly do late at night in America if you’re under 21. In England, you can go out to dinner in a pub and hang out, much as we’ve taken to doing in coffee shops. I tell her that we recently acquired modern conveniences like electricity and so we go to things like movies and restaurants. But, she counters, everything closes at eleven so where do you go after hours? How do you survive until 21 if every Saturday night you go home after closing time? She goes out for a drink with friends and sits for hours. She maintains that it’s not about drinking but about socializing. This may be the more significant difference between the cultures. For us, it’s about swallowing (or sometimes chugging) and for Europeans, the focus is on what comes with the drink.

Many of my friends at Hillel come to Friday night dinner and then go drinking. We have to make sure that we end early enough so that we don’t get continual drifters walking out. And this year, we have a Chabad house in town for the first time, so when it came to Simhat Torah, we had to consider that many students would prefer to go there after services for the alcohol because Hillel would be dry. As plans for Purim kick into high gear, we have to think about the celebrations afterwards. While the alcohol may make the megillah reading go faster, it begs the question: what are the holidays all about? We may get more people in the door and staying, but maybe we shouldn’t be encouraging students to wed Purim and Simhat Torah to alcohol at all.

I will heartily acknowledge that I was in a bar at about a quarter after midnight on my birthday. I had two drinks and we moved on. Dinner that night came with a bottle of wine. There are now more late night choices on Saturday nights. I still have to get my driver’s license renewed – the most exciting part about it is that the blue ‘of age’ label matches my red hair much better than the red underage label. But I don’t have an intense desire to bar hop or indulge in a late nightcap. I am not an advocate of legalizing everything to decrease the seductiveness, but I think that a little perspective is called for. You can kill yourself or anyone else behind the wheel as a sixteen year old. You can own almost any kind of gun or die for your country at eighteen. Likewise you can also influence the political process and get married. You can be an ‘adult’ but you can’t drink until twenty-one… Some things will never make sense…

[Posted 1/22/04]