Friday 27 April 2007

Drunk with Laws

There are calls for it to become illegal to give alcohol to your children who are under 15.

This is in response to the rise in binge drinking. It is a total lack of reasoning, correlation (in Europe, kids are introduced to alcohol at an early age) and brainless knee-jerk reaction.

Binge-drinking in itself is not the issue. The issue is the disorder and violence that people perform while intoxicated. This need not be the case. I have been known to have a drink or three in the past and I did not pick fights, hurl abuse, traffic cones or my dinner across the high street. People need to be responsible for their actions regardless of being drunk or stoned, come to that.

If people decide to get drunk as fast as possible on a regular basis, this may be more to do with insecurity, lack of self-control and self-worth. It may be more to do with the advertising strategies of the Industry who create such cretinous alcopops as WKD. Preventing parents giving alcohol to their offspring is probably one of the LAST things to worry about.

Their reaction to an issue is a call for more law and in particular more law that invades the home and sets one member of the family against the other. We have plenty of laws able to deal with parents who abuse or neglect their children. There is no need for more laws. There is no need for more specific laws that codify our existence.

We need less law and more Rule of Law.

2 comments:

Mandrill said...

The issue is neither the binge drinking or the chaos that binge drinkers cause. These are both symptoms of a wider cause. But because treating this cause requires allowing people to be ultimately responsible for their own actions, it necessarily undermines every other invasive and nannyish regulation that this government has ever brought in.
They think that they can fix things by plastering regulation upon regulation until we're drowning in bureaucracy and legalism and can't take a breath without filling in a form and getting the permission some petty official, they have no idea how wrong they are. This self perpetuating insanity is destroying our freedom and, even more importantly, our individuality. Those in power will not be happy until we're all mindless, numbered drones slotting neatly into our economic pigeonholes and keeping them in the manner to which they'd like to be accustomed.
People drink to escape their daily life, they want to escape their daily life because they don't feel there's any way to change it, they don't feel there's anyway to change it because successive generations have had all the spirit squashed out of them by a system that wants order and control over every aspect of our existence. We don't feel that we are in control of, or responsible for our own lives. Our Jobs are things imposed upon us that we need to do or starve, and not things we do of the pure enjoyment of using our natural talent. We've been told again and again that we shouldn't enjoy our work, so we don't go looking for work we enjoy, and so we drink.
Sometimes these busybodies really piss me off.

CFD Ed said...

These calls are actually insane. Drinking wine etc., under controlled conditions, at home, when children are young enough to be handled by their parents, is the best way for them to experience and learn to handle alcohol responsibly.

There is something quite sinister about the mind set that would propose it, some one who would like the state to take total responsibility for raising children perhaps.

This proposal is the equivalent of insisting young drivers should not be allowed to have driving lessons before having to handle a motor vehicle.