When I was a young man I was indestructible.  It’s why I used to drink heavily and then drive.  It’s why sometimes when I woke in the morning that I had no idea where I’d been or how I managed to get home.
 

By the grace of God…
 

Then I was scared straight.  I must have been 24 years old at the time and was underemployed by a local radio station and had dropped out of grad school and lost a girlfriend and my dad was hospitalized following a series of strokes and a serious heart attack.  You can make every excuse you want for drinking.  It’s a friend’s birthday, it’s the 4^th of July, and it’s the cold weather.  Yeah, there was always a reason to go out and drink.  Besides, I lived just two miles from the bar where I would decamp. 
 

Which I did one night coming home from visiting the old man at the hospital.  In fact I decamped until closing time, just after 2:00 A.M.  It was raining when I started home and I missed my last turn and put my old Delta 88 into a ditch.  A big car can sometimes withstand a great deal of punishment and I backed it out and then managed to make my turn.  I hadn’t seen the police officer behind me but it didn’t take him long to catch up.  The fellow knew me and knew I was a few hundred feet from the driveway.  He followed me home and I never heard another word about that night from local law enforcers.  Heck, many of those guys were my drinking buddies.  You realize today they wouldn’t have a choice.  Cameras in police cars remove discretion from the traffic stop.  I got very, very lucky. 
 

The next morning I got out of bed and looked in the bathroom mirror and realized things needed to change.  It changed my drinking habits and it changed my driving habits.  Thank the Lord I never killed anybody.  Two guys from my high school killed themselves driving drunk.  One was one of my closest friends from childhood.  I still miss him and I wish he had taken to heart the message.  You see he had been stopped many times and finally charged.  It didn’t change his behavior.
 

Another kid I went to school with, and he wasn’t a friend, was driving drunk a few years ago when he struck and killed a little girl playing on her front lawn.  This guy was a self-centered and callous low-life at school and it didn’t change when he became an adult.  Some folks back home told me he continued to find ways to drink and drive while awaiting trial.  And the prison time probably won’t straighten him out.  What’s the solution?  I’ll go out on a limb and recommend solitary confinement for twenty years.  His walls would be papered with pictures of the little girl. 
 

Drinking is part of the American culture.  It’s what colonialists did to pass the time and isolation caused by great distance.  Entertainments were sparse.  The liberal commentator, Bill Moyers, states it simply as, “Colonial America was perpetually three sheets to the wind”.  I’ll give him credit for making an important point in a very simple manner. 
 

Our sporting culture is intertwined with the alcohol industry.  As well as a good part of the entertainment culture.  It reminds me of all the TV movies I watched growing up.  Leslie Nielsen and all the other movie of the week characters always had a rock glass in one hand and a barbed quip on the tongue.  Mike Hammer seemed to live in a bar. 
 

So I’m not offering any solutions as I still enjoy a good drink at home or just one with dinner at a restaurant.  I will say this, however.  Culture isn’t to blame for a lack of personal responsibility.  If I ever fall off the wagon or put it into a ditch it’ll be the fault of no one but the fellow I see every morning in the mirror. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.