Something Witty….
When watching TV (an odd occurance I know) last night while having tea, there was a program on BBC1 called “Inside Out” which was examining the problem of teen drinking. The main highlight of the feature was an on-site report in Devon of a large group of teenagers drinking and getting blasted out of their brains when they’re only about 12-14. I’m not about to condone teenage drinking, especially in the quantity they were consuming (which caused two ambulances to be called), but I’m not going to get high and mighty and say that I didn’t drink while underage. Lord knows I came to university when I was 17, so for my entire first year of Uni I was drinking underage.
The teens however were getting fake IDs from the internet by sending a passport photo and a tenner to a company which then did the card. They tried interviewing one of the people who ran the company who continued walking and looked a little flustered when answering the questions. I commented at the time that he should have just stopped, and done a proper, formal interview with the cameras rather than trying to continually walk away and having problems answering the questions.
In retrospect, what the program was doing was creating a flase monster out of the company and the man. They completely absolved any guilt the children, parents, shops or anybody else had when contributing to the underage drinking. Yes the man was essentially selling fake IDs (he called them “novelty cards” which is an argument in semantics), but like he said, he is not responsible for what the kids do with the cards. His site didn’t say the cards were to be used for buying alcohol. Again I find myself asking: WHERE THE HELL ARE THE PARENTS? Why the hell aren’t these kids parents telling their kids that they shouldn’t drink, that it can essentially cause them to die with the amounts they are drinking. This is the same argument for kids who go loco because of video games. These kids are not being brought up correctly by their parents as they are not having strong moral and ethica values imprinted upon them. Good parenting rarely leads to problem children.
And what about the police? Why weren’t they routinely called to disperse these underage drinking parties, who are doing it in the middle of a park in damn near broad daylight? What about the shops? Shop attendants are not given the legal backing to be able to outright refuse sale to people underage if they produce “proof”. If they refuse sale and the card is proven to be fake, then kudos all round, but if not, then the sale attendant gets a slap on the wrist and all kinds of litigious crap breaks loose.
This is of course not to mention the kids responsibility. At that age, yes, they’re going to do what their peers do, but if any of them had any kind of sense, they would moderate their drinking or not goddamn do it at all.
In all, the feature was remarkably bias and left a lot to answer for. It came across as a bunch of journalists who were hungry for a story and focused in on something which has been thrust into the spotlight. It seems once again I’ve been let down by a lack of perspective and also a lack of getting to the root of the problem.
