Kids Drinking and Driving
As I was driving into work this morning, I heard on WTOP that Virginia is going to make a stiffer penalty for underage kids that have a blood alcohol level of .02 or higher to lose their drivers license for one year automatically. .02 BAL is about the equivalent of 1 drink. One DRINK! I can see the argument on either side, .02 is nothing. But why not any traces of alcohol and make it illigeal. First of all, underage drinking is illegal on a national level. so with a BAL of .02, the kid has had something with alchol in it, thus he is “drunk” or has had a drink. So why not make it .01 or higher?
The other side could be that the kid took something with alcohol in it that is leagal, such as medican or something along those lines. No that one is a tough one that I am not going to even TOUCH! Just know it out there.
Anyways, my flip side of the story is that I was reading an article out of time magazine this morning waiting for the coffee to start up about Steve Carell and 10 questions people asked him. Funny stuff! Well I finished that and flipped the page and read another article with the headline, “Society: Drinking Do it With Your Kids, They won’t get tipsy if they toast with the folks”. What kind of message is that sending? Now Jimmy, you can’t drink on your own or with your friends or drink after that, but it ok to drink with mommy and daddy because we can monitor your alcohol. What kind of Bullshit is that? I remeber my parents having parties at home and of course we were not allowed to have drinks. But we still snuck them when they weren’t around. In the mean time my parents were working on forgetting their own names. Now I am not saying I have bad parents, but were checking every now and then to see wht we were doing. When they weren’t looking, that is when we struck!
So what is my point? We have one side of the society saying kids should not be drinking and driving. Then the other saying, it is ok for the kids to drink, but only with their parents. Shouldn’t we be saying as a whole that kids should not be drinking period? If we all look at the federal law, it says it pretty clearly, you must be 21 years of age to legally drink. I am not saying that we can control underage drinking easily. Hell, just look at me, it wasn’t to difficult in high school or my first two years at college, but I did drink before I was 21. I just don’t think we should be putting it out there glorifying or saying it is ok to help your children drink, they will find other means of percuring the good stuff.