Originally published on Facebook, 3/11/10
The great moral crusade of our time has returned. The people are gathering their forces, marshalling their platoons on the internet and when the City Council meets on March 23rd, they have promised to come out by the hundreds to protest the gross violation of their rights that is being proposed. Power, they say, to the people! Our rights cannot be denied! The Council is flouting the will of the people!
Yes, Iowa City is once again looking to raise the bar entry age to 21 only and once again, the student body is letting itself be played for chumps both sides in this debate. On the one hand, the proponents of 21 only and many members of the community are taking this opportunity to once again denounce the hordes of students that rampage through downtown in mobs of wild drunken bands smearing and tarnishing the good name of the city they love. (These same people of course, ignore the myopic development policy that left little room for businesses other than bars to succeed downtown in the wake of the opening of the Coral Ridge Mall and coincidentally, they bitch about the students while at the same time faithfully attending football games, basketball games, shows at Hancher and giving gobs of money to the University and by extension the same student body that essentially keeps downtown Iowa City in business. Shot of hypocrisy, anyone?)
On the other side, multiple bar owners have transformed themselves into pious pillars of the community- the Martin Luther Kings and Ceaser Chavez's of Iowa City, fighting to protect the rights of the student body. But let's not fool ourselves here: bar owners don't give a shit about students. They only care about their bottom line and the money they bilk students out of.
Let's consider: what people apparently want is the right to go into such fine, wonderful and clean drinking establishments as the Third Base, Jake's, SpoCo or Summit and hang out with their friends. Because, being under 21, there's no way they're actually being served alcohol in these places right? That would be illegal. That would be the bar owners failing to do as they promised and actually police themselves... and they've got the situation totally under control, right? And since no one underage is being served alcohol in the 19 and up establishments, well then, what's the big deal? Students want the right to go into nice, clean bars and just hang out? Why then do bar owners care if they can't serve said students booze?
Cover charges! That's right- students are essentially mobilizing to demand the right to pay for admission to a bar that can't legally serve them booze. In other words, they're being played so bar owners can make (even more) money.
That nugget of wisdom should come as no real surprise to anyone. Opponents say that if banned from the bars, then house parties would become a huge problem. Samantha Miller's recent column in the Daily Iowan makes an excellent point as well- the dynamics of sexual assault on campus would surely change as well. And if the Council is so blindingly stupid as to pass a 21 only ordinance without planning for an aggressive push by all levels of law enforcement to curb house parties as well, then this will be, once again, a titanic waste of everybody's time.
But what confuses me the most is this: when I was a freshmen, lo those many moons ago, no one actually went to the bars to drink. Between cover charges and the price of drinks, it cost money to do so on a regular basis. Students by and large would drink in their dorm rooms, apartments and other residences because it was cheaper than dropping a huge chunk of change downtown. If you were under 21, bars were just where you went to hang out. You did your drinking on the sly elsewhere because it was cheaper, didn't risk getting busted with a fake or a PAULA ticket for that matter and then you stumbled downtown to 'hang out.'
So if the Council passes a 21 only ordinance, will it lead to an explosion of house parties? Probably not. (That's where student do a lot of their drinking now.) Will it be the end of the world? Nope. All it will mean is that if you're under 21, 'pre-gaming it' will become the only game in town.
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