From:    Donna.                                 
To:      All                                    Msg #182, Aug-27-93 05:43AM
Subject: Re: Thought Experiment: SWI

Just some general comments regarding this thought experiment.

Some folks mentioned that A could have walked home or taken a taxi.  Reading 
those responses made me wonder what kinds of towns y'all live in!  In the 
=best= neighborhoods around here, I wouldn't advise an intoxicated person to 
be out walking the streets at night.  The two people in this scenario happened 
to live less than a mile from each other, but what if A was farther from home 
than that? 

To get a taxi around here, one would have to call a cab company first, so A 
would have to find a phone and -- in an unknown apartment complex -- B would 
be the most likely way for A to find that phone; if B is so insistent on 
persuading A and if A is too drunk/tired to keep from being persuaded by B's 
relentless pushing, I wouldn't expect "getting a taxi" to be all that 
reasonable an option for A.  Obviously, in areas where taxis roam the streets 
looking for fares, the story would be different. 

To those who suggested that A was stupid for trying to sleep off the drunk in 
A's car, well, I don't know about other areas, but that's actually what our 
local PD =recommends= intoxicated persons do: crawl into one's parked car (the 
presumption is that the car is still in the parking lot of the bar where one's 
intoxication took place), lock the doors, keep the keys out of the ignition, 
and hunker down into the back seat to sleep it off.  We're harsh on drunk 
=driving= but don't care so much about drunks who aren't near the steering 
wheels of their vehicles, especially when the car isn't running and even more 
especially when the keys aren't even in the ignition. 

Obviously, all of these comments reflect on the area local to me.  I don't 
drink much alcohol myself, and if I'm out in public I practically never have 
more than one mixed drink with dinner, so I don't have any kind of personal 
repertoire of alternatives to offer people who do drink in public. 

Regrettably, I didn't get to see any of the responses which spoke to the 
stupidity of the parents who churned out people like A and B.  Maybe this was 
an isolated evening of crass stupidity on A's part, maybe this was an isolated 
evening of crass lack of self-esteem on B's part, or maybe neither of them 
learned how to be responsible, caring adults by their parents.  We don't have 
to argue whether or not the event was rape to agree that the incident was an 
unfortunate one, and the worst part about it is that it COULD have been 
prevented.  It wasn't prevented by their parents, and now both A =and= B not 
only get to suffer it directly but they get to suffer derision from us because 
of it.  If A and B had been older, I wouldn't be so worried about their 
parents' part in this evening, but part of the scenario WAS that they were 
both young and inexperienced in the ways of the world.  I think it's quite 
telling that the vast majority of problems involving alcohol are seen in young 
people: it tells me that our parents don't do much to prepare us, as a group, 
and it tells me that most of us who live through our early mistakes at least 
manage to learn from them... which in turn suggests that maybe this is one 
area where our parents (and other adult influences) =could= have taught us 
before we made those mistakes. 

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