Eat, drink, and be merry

It takes an outpouring of tears and the embraces of distraught family to illuminate the destructive ramifications of binge drinking. This scene plays out every couple of years after the police find another drowned student with a blood alcohol content much higher than it should have been in the river - that now godforsaken river that in the past 30 years has claimed 25 lives. Throw into the mix students who have tumbled over the sheer rock face of the bluffs thanks to having drank too much, and it becomes clear that there's a problem.

An editorial in The Racquet won't change the systematic phenomenon that makes drinking oneself into oblivion the status quo. Even adpoting an ordinance that would ban liquor sales in La Crosse would be useless; students, emboldened, would still find a way.
It's a trifling, petty issue to spar about little adjustments here-and-there to make boozing less desirable, much in the same way bickering about Pro-Life/Pro-Choice policy issues grows maddeningly tiresome. The answer isn't in the minutiae of policy.

While plenty of initiatives to turn students away from binging have merit and should be pursued to their greatest extent - particularly the work of the La Crosse County Changing Culture Coalition, which is sponsoring a YouTube video contest that promotes alternatives to drinking – they're not going to fundamentally change the way students approach drinking. An editorial in The Racquet won't change the systematic phenomenon that makes drinking oneself into oblivion the status quo. 

Simplistically, this means taking precautions. If the urge to drink into blackout is overwhelming, be sure there are people around who won't be in the same state of mind seven shots of Evan Williams down the road. Be sure whoever is providing the car ride home sees his drunk passengers all the way to their front doors. Don't end up at some wop party half-way across the city without someone to walk home with. Like those posters in many of the dorms emphasize, "You wouldn't leave your cell phone at the bar; don't leave your wingman." Friends of the world, pay heed.

Having seen the devastated Meyers family grieve Craig's passing, walking down the "just don't drink" path seems like the smartest way to go … but it's the naïve way to go. So far, it seems everything else has been nobly tried, but things aren't getting better. At The Racquet, we'll do what we can: The Props ‘n' Drops that document yaking into a sewer grate after wristband night or waking up with some vagrant you don't remember going to bed with are things of the past. Let's keep it positive, like giving props to a friend for "accidentally" rear-ending a Prius with his Hummer, or giving drops to the roommate who has taken up cooking with exotic spices that smell like a Botswanan dung fire.

If the submission-well runs dry, it was fun while it lasted, and maybe the greater student population isn't the sophisticated bunch so many pretend it is.

The bottom line: be smart. If you were for whatever reason forced to watch an hour of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, no one will begrudge you for spending a night with Madame Tequila and waking up on someone's roof wearing a Spiderman costume and sporting a new piercing. Just be sure you have friends around who can bring a ladder.