My brother insisted I share a beer with him for my birthday. I initially didn't want to, because I don't like beer at all, but I thought I might as well have one to shut him up. On NYE I got drunk for the first time in years, almost certainly because I had lower tolerances as a result of that abstention. Although it didn't actually result in my getting a hangover, I felt bad about it for other reasons. This time around though I didn't feel pressured to drink from someone else.
timmy wrote:Drinking culture in this country is a terrifyingly destructive force, and I don't know whether it's just that it didn't used to be talked about or that kids these days are fuckwits, but jesus is alcohol related violence on the upper. Everyone knows someone affected.
Drinking culture is one of those things that society likes to tolerate in the older members but frowns upon the younger you are, which is why the media loves ragging on about those kids being drunken fuckwits. I'd be willing to bet that kids twenty, thirty, forty years ago and even longer, were just as violently rambunctious but it wasn't reported or talked about.
Remember, as a general rule, the crime rate has actually
fallen consistently over the last few decades, outside of the occasional outliers and spikes. But you wouldn't know it if you tuned in to Today Tonight or ACA. Even so, if the kids today are getting stupidly drunk, my first thought falls on why their parents either allow it or don't do anything about it.