Monday, February 14, 2011
When doing right is wrong (by anon)
Last semester my roommate was found guilty for violating the alcohol policies in the dorms. He was forced to attend several LIT programs that revolved around the dangers of underage drinking and I went along with him just for the sake of it. While we were there they had us role play scenarios of how drinking can negatively affect us and our friends based off our past experiences and at the end they asked us what we learned from it. I thought this was ridiculous because there was absolutely nothing to learn since everything we did was based off our own experiences. No one learned anything from anyone else because everyone made a huge mockery out of it since we were being treated as if we were 10 years old. Now I understood the whole point they were trying to get through to us so I kept my mouth shut, but what really pissed me off was when they gave us guidelines on how to drink safely. One of these guidelines was "every time you drink have a designated sober person to keep a safe eye on things". I agree with that for most part but the reason it pissed me off was because my roommate WAS that sober person keeping an eye on things. Yet he still got in just as much trouble as everyone who was drinking underage. After it was all over, the LIT group offered everyone snacks and drinks while they were being shown how to play soda pong, which sounds very similar to beer pong but don't get the two mixed up, they are VERY different. What kind of message does this send? They teach us to do the right things yet we will still get in trouble for doing it. They talk about the problems that co-exist with alcohol and they want to see it all disappear but realizing this is impossible, they created programs to guide students in the right direction. Guiding students to be safer around alcohol is a good thing, but don't prosecute us when we do so.
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It's just that it's too expensive to personalize everything to everyone's individual needs. They have to generalize things, and, well, "you can't please all of the people all of the time." They're just throwing shit out there and hoping some of it sticks, and I can't really fault them for that.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it... was the message they were sending supposed to be, "it's dangerous to drink underage, but if you do, make sure there's someone sober around to keep an eye on things" ?
ReplyDeleteEither way... it's kind of ridiculous to me that somehow they are trying to advocate sobriety at all, I mean, after all, this is UW-Whitewater, and among other UW schools, we are also well-known for partying and drinking. There are thirsty Thursday shirts for sale at the UC, not to mention homecoming shirts that say things like "It's not alcoholism til you graduate" and general messages promoting bars and excessive drinking for homecoming, and all are clearly associated with this university in one way or another. If you are a non-drinker here, it's somewhat difficult to remove yourself and look past the social standard of drinking. My guess is a LOT of drinking goes on in the dorms that goes uncaught. Maybe instead of the university funding stupid programs that basically send no relative, positive, enlightening messages to students, the university should think about the ways in which it actually helps promote excessive drinking as well as underage drinking in general. Two things that might not be such a problem if students would just think about alcohol and the way it's viewed in this town vs. they way THEY personally view it and it's effects, short term as well as long term. It's so easy for students to want to jump into that social ritual of frequent alcohol consumption, and there doesn't seem to be much around to tell students that it might be wiser to do otherwise.