Advent Calendar: December 12th

I won't bore you by making you read any of my final papers. Some interesting subjects, but generally poorly and dryly written. Not blog material.

But I will debrief one of them, if that's okay, because I have a thought that I couldn't include in the paper that might be topical for Puke on Your Birthday. My final paper for my qualitative research class asked us to design a hypothetical research project. I put together a project that studied underage drinkers in Northeast Philadelphia. I used the opening line of the second Northeast Times story I copied a few months ago as the opening line to my proposal. Was underage drinking truly our "birthright"? I would design focus group questions to research what that means, and if it's true, and how that affects the safety and health of the youth population around here.

I had a good time thinking about it, even though I'm really bad at writing proposals and the paper was a piece of shit and I'm looking at a 28/30 from the easiest graders at the school (plus, there was a huge focus on social justice in this class, and I don't quite know if it's possible to connect social justice to the privileged white asshole teen population of the NEast). But it was interesting be in that headspace this week, and actually thinking about the problem (or, depending on how old you are and your home's proximity to the woods, the "problem") of children going into the woods at night to drink alcohol.

Some of my research was about the laws that exist to prevent (to varying degrees of success) underage drinking. One that has always stood out to me is the law that states that parents whose home give space for underage drinking will be punished more harshly than the children. There is nothing in the law that considers the parents' role in this, whether they condoned the underage drinking or if it was occurring without their permission. Either way, if there is a gathering of under-21-year-olds in a house, the parents who own the house could potentially be fined (or jailed or whatever, I'm not familiar with the details of this law).

Doesn't seem fair to me, but okay, that's the law. It should theoretically serve to motivate parents to be hard-lined against underage drinking, and to take initiative to prevent that type of lawbreaking from occurring in their home. Fine. I'm not here to dispute that. But I am here to dispute that the law is not consistent.

Kids aren't always drinking in homes. As mentioned in the thesis of this research project, they are drinking in the woods too. If we're being consistent and using the same logic, then adults should be punished whenever kids are caught drinking in the woods, no? Employees at the Department of Recreation should be fined and/or jailed. Cops who are supposed to be patrolling the area but negligently choose not to should be fined and definitely jailed. For real! The law states that it doesn't matter if the parents in their homes are condoning the lawbreaking; it states that they are responsible anyway because the lawbreaking is occurring on their turf. Why shouldn't it be the same everywhere?

I mean, we all know the reason. Cops aren't held responsible for anything, let alone the consumption of beverages by minors they'll never meet. An off-duty cop could walk into the woods and murder one of those teenagers in cold blood with an illegal firearm, and maybe they'd be put on suspension with pay. I'm not arguing that we live in a just world, I'm just arguing that we should. And if we did live in a just world, every loser cop who complains about teenagers drinking in the woods of the Great Northeast would be held personally responsible when they fail to supervise the wooded areas of their district properly.