There Are No Petty Youth Rights Issues
For a while now, NYRA hadn’t done much at all with the drinking age issue. All of our campaigns had been about lowering the voting age, or curfew laws, or ageism in general. With the Vermont campaign, we have finally taken some much needed action to lower the drinking age. Because of this high profile campaign however, there has been some criticism by our members and other youth rights supporters who regard the drinking age (and other similar issues) as petty, dangerous, and a waste of time.
Why waste our time on something as petty as allowing kids to get drunk, when there are more pressing things out there like the right to vote, corporal punishment, behavior modification schools, compulsory education, and so on? The right to drink, and the right to smoke, and the right to gamble and such are not petty issues.
Smoking and drinking are civil rights issues. Human rights issues. At stake here is are the important American, and indeed universal, principles of freedom and equality. There is nothing petty about it.
The drinking age and smoking age are just two of the many ways in which young people are oppressed by society and treated as second class citizens. These laws reinforce the idea that youth are helpless, deviant sub-humans. It is that attitude we must confront, and we must confront it from all directions. All youth rights issues feed into each other. Believe it or not fighting the drinking age helps fight corporal punishment and vice versa.
When people dismiss the effort to lower the drinking age as petty they misplace the emphasis of the campaign. We choose to lower the drinking age not because we care about alcohol, absolutely not, I don’t drink at all. We choose to lower the drinking age because it unfairly discriminates youth and makes them criminals for behaving like the rest of society. If you have a problem with alcohol, then reinstitute prohibition for the entire population - all ages. Then its no longer a youth rights issue.
As it stands now, it most definitely IS a youth rights issue. It is not a petty issue either. Whenever a person is subjected to arrest, jail, fines, and expulsion due to an unjust, ageist law it is not petty. It is an extensive problem in that it affects so many people. I wouldn’t be surprised if it affected more people than corporal punishment does. Not that I mean to slight the crusade against the barbaric practice of corporal punishment, just trying to put things in perspective.
As for it being petty, please consider how many ‘petty’ issues championed now and in the past. How important, honestly, is the right to decide which seat on a bus to sit in? If I told you to sit in seat A instead of seat B, do I do a tangible harm to you? Do you have physical scars from it? Is your life ruined? No. Its something as petty as being able to pick seat A instead of seat B.
Why then do we, 50 years later, laud the actions of Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King for their heroic battle against assigned seating? Because it is one more symptom, one more indignity, one more oppression from a long, long list. We think of this as a civil rights issue, and rightfully so. But in reality it is far less important, in a practical sense, than the right to drink alcohol.
Would you invest your life into sparking a decades long movement against…a seating chart? I would. Not because lives are destroyed by assigned seats on a bus, but because lives are destroyed by a society that treats people as something less than human. A sub-section of society that must put up with prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and countless laws that restrict and strip away their freedom and dignity. THIS is the reason it is wrong to require Rosa Parks to sit at the back of the bus and THIS is the reason it is wrong to arrest a 20 year old for having a beer at a restaurant. There is nothing petty about it.
Is it necessarily the most pressing issue the youth rights movement faces? No. In my opinion lowering the voting age is the most important, because with it comes political power that can affect all other youth rights issues. However that doesn’t mean lowering the drinking age isn’t important. Furthermore it is a popular issue that can bring in lots of people to the cause and expose them for the first time to our ideas about youth equality. Once introduced on familiar terms they will be more receptive to battles against corporal punishments, behavior modification centers, curfews and everything else out there.
It is for these reasons (and many more) that NYRA works to lower the drinking age. Once again, its not about alcohol or cigarettes (two things I wouldn’t mind sinking to the bottom of the ocean), it is about equality.