No rape but a lot of drinking

It’s with misgivings that this post on “schoolies” is even written.  In Australia, the annual end of school binge is upon them when underage drinkers converge on resort hotspots for three weeks.

This year, there’s an added factor – Facebook.  A committee has organized a competition to see which 17 year olds can go to the worst excesses, date-raping, vomiting and so on.

“It will help motivate some to move out of their comfort zone and try something new to earn some points,” say the group’s administrators. “It will enhance the enjoyment of the overall Schoolies experience.”

Under the points system, a point is allocated for each standard drink consumed while a point is deducted for drinking a bottle of water.  Vomiting earns five points, fighting 35 and being arrested 40.

What do authorities do?  SFA.  Nothing.  They step back and let it happen, with lame warnings about “being safe”.  Right, yeah, being safe in a pile of vomit, having lost your virginity as a dare and having got into a bar brawl to earn more points.

Again, the hypocrisy factor looms in front of my eyes because we went on a binge after schooldays had finished too but this thing this year … it seems to be getting into the bizarre.  I’d venture to say that there is a difference between a couple of days hijinks when our authority figures, parents and teachers, relaxed the moral code for a short time and though there was no reimposition of it later, there was an unwritten understanding that it was time to get back to civilization after that.

This thing in Australia is an invitation for the country’s 17 year olds to go on the rampage, breaking every rule in the book and to hell with anyone else.  If you were to take a snapshot of the next morning, with vomit everywhere and all the kids lying about on lawns, in gardens, comatose and dissolute and if you were to hold that up and ask, “Is this our vision of how we see our future?” then how would you answer that?

Again, you have to sheet home the blame for this to parents who allow it.  By that age, there’s not a lot you can do about preventing nooky and all you can hope for is that your kid exercises some discretion which you’ve inculcated over a period of years, providing you yourself have some. It’s all about the authority you exercised at home and how you gave your kids clear parameters of what was OK and what was not … and enforced them at the cost of temporary lack of warm feelings of your kids towards you.

In other words, you needed to have said no a few times and no meant no.  Then you could say no to them going to this binge but they can have something else more locally.  Because for you to allow them to this thing means that you also funded it.

You have to sheet it home to police who’ll crack down on a wheelie bin misplaced or a hate crime of someone not wanting some bloody great mosque in their backyard but don’t mind the kids turning into beasts for three weeks.

You can sheet it home to adults who laugh and say this is just kids “letting their hair down” and see nothing at all wrong with either the organized aspects of it or the sheer lack of any sort of good relations between the sexes or any sort of concept of how to behave.

I’ll give you an example.  When we had our end of schooldays thing, we went to the forest and were all trying to get into the females pants – fair enough.  Guilty.  The difference was that the females had control over that and one of our number who lost his reason and came on hard to the girls had to be constrained by a few of us.  He actually put an axe through his foot in his rage. That’s the difference I’m going on about.  Now there’d be no protection of the females because we’re talking about beasts here.

Alison writes of date rape and respect – well here is the test of it.  When every female present, someone’s daughter, is a potential points scorer for someone in the competition, where is this respect that’s being talked about?

There’s a boiling frog principle here.  Each succeeding generation has lost more and more of the self-respect which once permeated society and so these schoolleavers today seem marginally more excessive than you were when you were not so long ago 17 and so on.  However, compare the 30 year difference in behaviours and it is frightening.

How does the utter lack of respect shown and the seeming “couldn’t care less” attitude of the parents sit with the libertarians?  How would a libertarian suggest we get society back on track?  Does libertarianism extend to what children do, undeveloped human beings who look for some sort of parameters, if not constraint?

Or does it all not matter any more?

Filed under: Life issues & people