I wake up early with the purple sunrise, somewhere around noon, and gaze out the window over my fresh mug of slow-brewed Mountain Dew. I begin to cook myself some toast, soy bacon and a vegetable omelet with all the fixings, but decide on some cold meatball pizza instead.
As I close my luxurious, silk robe with the ninja turtles print and slide on the slippers my dog (roommate) has brought me in his mouth, I turn an eye toward the old bookshelf — my long-forgotten friend.
The dark cherry wood inlay, once carved to look like a thousand singing cherubs, has now faded. The brilliant veneer has lost its shine. My old friend has deteriorated so much it now looks almost as if it were just a plank of dusty faux-wood screwed into a dorm room wall.
My eyes dutifully scan the collection of books. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. The SparkNotes guide to Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. And of course, Barbra: The Way She Is, the renowned Streisand biography by The New York Times bestselling author Christopher Anderson.
And there are so many more. Textbooks, reference books, novels, plays, novellas, how-tos. Even one that’s blank. But unfortunately, I cannot bring myself to read these books.
For you see, I’ve now been through 12 grades of college preparation, and even two years removed, it’s hard for me to pick up a book without grimacing.
In third grade, I loved reading. And I was good at it too. I used to read entire chapter books in one day. No kidding. Take that, Ann M. Martin. I mean . . . I of course meant to say R.L. Stine.
But come fourth grade, the workload changed.
I started having to read a lot. We’re talking assigned reading. Something unbearable like two pages. And we’re talking per day mind you, not per week. Suddenly reading was a chore. A horrible, intolerable chore. And something I wouldn’t be caught dead doing for fun.
By senior year of high school, I was reading entire chapter books in one day. And I hated every teacher-assigned, standard-mandated minute of it.
In the future, schools are going to require students to watch a certain amount of TV every day. And children will hate it. They’ll read until the last possible second to avoid watching TV. Because children, nay, humans hate to be told what to do.
If schools mandated ice cream, kids would hate ice cream. And if schools forbade ice cream, you can bet your bottom dollar kids would sneak in Snoopy bars and Drumsticks in the bottom of their backpacks. Their cold, sticky backpacks.
Don’t believe me? I seem to remember a certain period in American history where a household commodity was prohibited for sale and consumption. This commodity continued to be sold and consumed, but at higher prices and in higher concentrations.
Said product became more valuable due to the legal danger of obtaining it. The product was less safe because the government could not regulate it. And what’s more, the people who consumed it became instant criminals, although they had done nothing but what was legal a few years earlier. And a few years later at that.
Anyone who guessed what period I’m talking about can email me to claim their prize: A complimentary copy of The Daily Free Press. This time period was 1920 to 1933, better known as the Prohibition.
Prohibition didn’t stop the alcohol trade. It was like telling a kid he couldn’t have ice cream and then leaving him alone in a Ben and Jerry’s with your Visa Platinum and a copy of your signature.
If something a kid wants is around and in ready supply and his friends are allowed to have it, he’s going to start wondering. Even an older kid. Even a college kid.
Allow me to propose a what-if. What if there was a mini-Prohibition that applied only to a certain demographic? What if everyone else was allowed to consume a certain product legally, but this one demographic was left out? And what if the product was readily available to everyone else in society?
Do you think this group of people would stop consuming the product? Or would they continue to consume it, but in unsupervised conditions, buying it off whomever they could and risking prosecution if they were caught doing what everyone else was allowed to do?
Well, it just so happens there is such a mini-Prohibition in effect. In a law passed in 1984, a fitting year, the federal government took control of the drinking age and raised it from 18 to 21, excluding a large portion of the population from legal consumption of alcohol. But not from illegal consumption.
Dear government: It was an interesting social experiment. Just like the original Prohibition. But it didn’t work. Please stop criminalizing a large population of new voters. Love, Ethan.
Ethan Rosenberg, a sophomore in the College of Fine Arts, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].