Self Analysis Post

I have to admit that when I first started writing the blog, I was leaning more strongly in favour of maintaining the drinking age, because lowering it in light of uncontrollable, irresponsible, unruly college students, and couching one’s reasons for doing so as in their (the college students) best interests, just reeked of giving in to bratty children. BUT, right from the start, I KNEW perfectly well that that is just my biased opinion, which is why, I initially didn’t commit to any particular stance on the age issue.

After researching the debate and looking over the arguments of the two main camps, as represented by the Amethyst Initiative and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, I was all the more convinced that taking a stance on the issue of age was not the direction to take. As anyone who has read this blog should see, the two opposing sides are arguing over the number of the age in relation to two distinct drinking issues, binge drinking and drunk driving, with each party being concerned with one drinking issue.

Initially, upon reading their arguments, I felt that each side had good reason to argue what they did. It also didn’t help that the CBS video on the recent drinking age debate did a pretty good job at presenting both sides, although admittedly, it did give more time to the Amethyst Initiative as the new kid on the block. The point is, I was fairly confused as to why two completely reasonable arguments could reach diametrically opposed conclusions.

However, even as I was unable to twist my mind round the clash of two seemingly equally valid ideas, it was apparent that there was a problem regarding the issue of drinking. As this article highlights, college binge drinking is on the rise, and more than just newspapers were making the claim, researchers had the same findings as well.

Then the line in Robert Schlesinger’s blog post on the drinking age caught my eye: “There are larger issues we need to address as a society regardless of what happens regarding the drinking age.” That really got me thinking out of the box. What if the crux of the debate lay not in the age, but in the “larger issues” underlying the superficial debate about a number? If society could focus on solving the larger problem of irresponsible alcohol consumption, then the debate surrounding the age, as it is currently framed, would be pretty much moot.

I felt somewhat vindicated when I stumbled across Joshua Sharp’s (a USC student) blog post which holds the same sentiment as I do, that it was the attitudes towards drinking, not the age, that mattered. I view this source as particularly significant as it represents a voice of a student, someone in the midst of college drinking rather than someone standing on the outside and analyzing a detached scenario. Even then, outside researchers reached the same conclusion, as shown by the study on how attractiveness and popularity are associated with binge drinking in young adults.

I trust this sufficiently explains why I am not particularly interested in finding an answer to the current age debate. Instead, I hope that my interrogation of the issue has provided a way through which an answer to the current age debate becomes unnecessary.

In addition, my research into this topic also disabused me of some common misconceptions such as other European countries having less of a youth drinking problem compared to America, which this study debunks. Finding out instances where my preconceived opinions were erroneous is important to my development as a thinker as it helps to ensure that my opinions are grounded in fact rather than rumour.

As for my development as a thinker in terms of making arguments, a productive learning experience from this project would be the exercise in focusing an argument and at the same time demonstrating a consideration for other aspects of the topic. For this reason, I had two posts on adulthood, which many see as pertinent to the age debate, in which I explained why I did not see an argument on adulthood as being all that significant to the alcohol issues at hand as per the way the current age debate is framed. After demonstrating a consideration of that issue, I then began on my overall argument that the problems of binge drinking and drunk driving, as well as the attitudes towards alcohol, were the fundamentals of the current age debate and should be considered in their own right.

Ultimately, with regard to the issue of drinking in America, I learnt that alcohol is one of the big controversies in the US. As this chapter in a book on Controversies introduces the issue of drinking, "Drinking [in America] has been blessed and cursed, has been held the cause of economic catastrophe and the hope for prosperity, the major cause of crime, disease and military defeat, depravity and a sign of high prestige, mature personality, and a refined civilization.” This is new to me as a foreigner because back home, we give way less thought to alcohol on the whole. Consequently, it can be said that in some ways, writing this blog has been a process of discovery of not only an intellectual nature, but also a cultural one.