I was doing street-level law enforcement when MADD opened its first chapter in north Louisiana. The Louisiana legislature had recently tightened up the DWI laws and MADD was coming to the courthouse to make sure that the judges applied the new sentencing provisions.
That's been a while back.
Nowadays, MADD is just a temperance movement, one that's been instrumental in the loss of civil rights for the 18-21 year old crowd. They get no links from me. However, a group of college and university presidents came out in favor of lowering the drinking age from 18 to 21, and the MADD mothers started spamming the good educators. Something about email chains and presidents getting hundreds of identical emails.
It's one thing to email a public servant and register outrage. It's something else to send hundreds of identical emails. Spam is spam. Hundreds of identical emails is spam. All spammers should die a horrible death.
Of course, the Madd mothers are directly responsible for the sissification of their college age children. When I was growing up and got college age, a great portion of my generation took their senior trip to Viet Nam. If anyone made the argument that an 18 year old could vote, execute a contract, buy a car, get married, join the Army, go to Viet Nam, but couldn't buy a drink, that person would have been laughed off the block.
Nowadays, it's just considered natural that 18-year-olds are children. The 18 year olds put up with it, so they've been sissified. It's a damn shame. We used to treat the 18-19-20 year old crowd like adults, but now they're just big children.
It's a damn shame.
5 comments:
i spend alot of time with espn on the tv and it's pretty routine to hear them refer to college athletes and even professional athletes in their mid 20's as 'kids'.
there should be one age (i don't care which 18,19,15,25 just pick one) for drinking, driving, voting, etc. Either you are old enough to be held responsible for your decisions or you're not.
imo if you are old enough to be in the military you should be considered an adult... and you should act like one.
mulligan said:
imo if you are old enough to be in the military you should be considered an adult... and you should act like one.
Therein lies the rub - not everyone matures at the same rate, so not every 18, 19, 20 y.o. can act like an adult. I have known some 16 y.o. that were much more mature than other 21 y.o.
I agree 100%. I think it's ludicrous that someone can go fight and die for their country but can't legally buy a drink.
I recall in the Virginia Tech school shooting the victims were all referred to as "children". College students aren't children, they stopped being children at 18, by law. They're young adults.
This doesn't make the massacre any less tragic, but people need to get their heads on straight and get back to factual, non-sensationalized journalism.
That ended a little off-topic hehe.
I second your mad-on for MADD. The BEST thing one can say about them is that they are busybodies, but they have most of the District Attorneys buffaloed with their court-packing tactics, the same tactics that if used by say, the "black-shirt" Anarchist crowd, gets the courtroom cleared.
I was busting drunk drivers before MADD was out of diapers, to the tune of about 20 per year while working a regular patrol district, NOT a traffic car. I didn't need MADD and I presume that they didn't need me. We got along fine without each other.
Once MADD got going, though, a strange thing happened. The crime of DUII got so politicized that the judges "had" to throw the book at everyone convicted of it, and THAT begat the specialized DUII attorneys, and THAT begat many, many DUII cases making the State Supreme Court, with the result that it got harder and harder to prosecute the crime. THAT resulted in less convictions.
So all that MADD has REALLY accomplished, over the years, is to make it harder for officers to arrest for DUII, made it harder to prosecute the ones who are arrested, and made it more expensive for everyone involved.
The only ones who have benefited from MADD are the lawyers, natch.
The drunk drivers didn't do too bad either. Jusy another unforseen consequence I guess.
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