We hate smokers, but love drunks
Need it happen every spring? Graduation means celebration. That means booze That means death for young people.
Blame our love of the highs that alcohol can bring. It’s trendy, and for sports lovers, well, beer is always great, So youngsters die in cars driven by drunks, and we resolve to do something about it, but mostly don’t.
Exception: Stafford Supervisor Mark Dudenhefer has focused on teen drivers and car safety. His daughter Emily died in 2004 in a car crash in Stafford. He was instrumental in getting last fall’s road bond referendum passed, and points to no teen deaths last year in Stafford from auto accidents.
Regardless, we hear of efforts to lower the drinking age and to let bars stay open later. A new area nightspot caters to college kids until 2:30 a.m. on weekends.
Falling too often on deaf ears are the warnings by Mothers Against Drunken Driving. They claim to have saved some 300,000 lives since 1980 by supporting such measures as sobriety checkpoint stops and ignition interlocks for convicted drunk drivers. MADD notes there were 129 alcohol-related car crashes in Stafford in 2007.
Nevertheless, you may think I’m just another tee-totaler. Wrong. I drink. I got drunk as a teenager and later. Back when the Redskins played in big games, my son and I would toast with a highball each time Washington scored.. Things did get out of hand when Doug Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter in a huge Super Bowl win over Denver.
That was then. Now I have come to realize something paradoxical.
While we pass laws to snuff out smoking for its health-destroying effects, lately trying to tax cigarettes into oblivion and ban them from all public places, we virtually ignore alcohol despite its far greater destructive power.
Anti-tobacco campaigns have erased most smoking on the TV and movie screens, while films still depict drinking as something cool and fun. Oh yeah? It wasn’t much fun in Stafford this March when over 60 were convicted on drunk-driving charges.
Sad to say, I’ve seen alcohol’s problems up close and personal, beyond those Redskins celebrations. While I once was hooked on cigarettes, one can survive them more easily. I’m living longer because I ended my three packs of Pall Malls a day at age 35. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be collecting on Social Security, putting the retiree program deeper in the hole.
But cigarettes don’t wreck marriages and families and kill motorists. Booze and beer do. They kill, and not only on the highway. An aunt died before age 35 of alcoholism. So did my wife’s father, before age 60. As a drunk driver he had killed a man. My daughter’s best teen friend died in a drunk driver’s crash in Falls Church. Alcohol has ruined the marriages of young relatives. It killed a friend’s husband driving drunk on U.S. 1. The consequences are devastating.
Such stories often fail to impress the young. As a teen in church, I used to laugh to myself on Pledge Sundays back in my old home town in Texas. Staunch members stood and proudly took the abstinence pledge. The night before, some had belted down a few at the country club. Back in those days, my town was officially dry for beer and booze but reportedly had one of the country’s highest rates of alcoholism.
My acquaintance with alcoholism is fortunately limited. But one movie I saw in my twenties certainly made me resolve never to go there. “Days of Wine and Roses” was a heart-wrenching film with Jack Lemmon becoming an alcoholic and then shaking it, but introducing his wife Lee Remick to drinking, and then she couldn’t.
How to survive alcoholism? It must be very difficult, although there are helpful AA chapters nationwide. In Stafford, they meet at the American Legion hall and at Aquia Episcopal, St. Peter’s Lutheran, and Mount Ararat Baptist churches.
It’s surely worth the effort.
For, as friend Frank Withrow has written, “,,,we live in the most amazing of times the world has ever known...We are blessed with wonders beyond belief.”
But booze can ruin it all for you and yours. So admit the problem, get help and stick around to see the Redskins again in the Super Bowl.
Blame our love of the highs that alcohol can bring. It’s trendy, and for sports lovers, well, beer is always great, So youngsters die in cars driven by drunks, and we resolve to do something about it, but mostly don’t.
Exception: Stafford Supervisor Mark Dudenhefer has focused on teen drivers and car safety. His daughter Emily died in 2004 in a car crash in Stafford. He was instrumental in getting last fall’s road bond referendum passed, and points to no teen deaths last year in Stafford from auto accidents.
Regardless, we hear of efforts to lower the drinking age and to let bars stay open later. A new area nightspot caters to college kids until 2:30 a.m. on weekends.
Falling too often on deaf ears are the warnings by Mothers Against Drunken Driving. They claim to have saved some 300,000 lives since 1980 by supporting such measures as sobriety checkpoint stops and ignition interlocks for convicted drunk drivers. MADD notes there were 129 alcohol-related car crashes in Stafford in 2007.
Nevertheless, you may think I’m just another tee-totaler. Wrong. I drink. I got drunk as a teenager and later. Back when the Redskins played in big games, my son and I would toast with a highball each time Washington scored.. Things did get out of hand when Doug Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter in a huge Super Bowl win over Denver.
That was then. Now I have come to realize something paradoxical.
While we pass laws to snuff out smoking for its health-destroying effects, lately trying to tax cigarettes into oblivion and ban them from all public places, we virtually ignore alcohol despite its far greater destructive power.
Anti-tobacco campaigns have erased most smoking on the TV and movie screens, while films still depict drinking as something cool and fun. Oh yeah? It wasn’t much fun in Stafford this March when over 60 were convicted on drunk-driving charges.
Sad to say, I’ve seen alcohol’s problems up close and personal, beyond those Redskins celebrations. While I once was hooked on cigarettes, one can survive them more easily. I’m living longer because I ended my three packs of Pall Malls a day at age 35. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be collecting on Social Security, putting the retiree program deeper in the hole.
But cigarettes don’t wreck marriages and families and kill motorists. Booze and beer do. They kill, and not only on the highway. An aunt died before age 35 of alcoholism. So did my wife’s father, before age 60. As a drunk driver he had killed a man. My daughter’s best teen friend died in a drunk driver’s crash in Falls Church. Alcohol has ruined the marriages of young relatives. It killed a friend’s husband driving drunk on U.S. 1. The consequences are devastating.
Such stories often fail to impress the young. As a teen in church, I used to laugh to myself on Pledge Sundays back in my old home town in Texas. Staunch members stood and proudly took the abstinence pledge. The night before, some had belted down a few at the country club. Back in those days, my town was officially dry for beer and booze but reportedly had one of the country’s highest rates of alcoholism.
My acquaintance with alcoholism is fortunately limited. But one movie I saw in my twenties certainly made me resolve never to go there. “Days of Wine and Roses” was a heart-wrenching film with Jack Lemmon becoming an alcoholic and then shaking it, but introducing his wife Lee Remick to drinking, and then she couldn’t.
How to survive alcoholism? It must be very difficult, although there are helpful AA chapters nationwide. In Stafford, they meet at the American Legion hall and at Aquia Episcopal, St. Peter’s Lutheran, and Mount Ararat Baptist churches.
It’s surely worth the effort.
For, as friend Frank Withrow has written, “,,,we live in the most amazing of times the world has ever known...We are blessed with wonders beyond belief.”
But booze can ruin it all for you and yours. So admit the problem, get help and stick around to see the Redskins again in the Super Bowl.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
5:54 PM
