It’s a Thursday night. At around 10:30pm you decide to go for a walk. When walking past the intramural fields, something catches your eye. There are about five large coach busses there, with crowds of funnily dressed students surrounding them. What are these busses doing, you may ask. Well, they are bussing SMU students to bars.
On any given Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, it is basically guaranteed that there will be multiple busses lined up by the intramural fields. These busses are supplied by the fraternity houses, and their job is to bus students back and forth from the houses to bars. Many students love the busses. This is a convenient way to get from the first part of the party to the second without having to worry about paying for a cab or finding someone with a car. Also, with busses running all night getting either to the bar or back to campus is easy. It works with your schedule, with minimal amounts of waiting. This also helps to reduce the amount of people driving to a bar, drinking, and then driving home. In this sense, it saves lives.
Some people, however, see a downside to the busses. By supplying a reliable form of transportation, more students are given the opportunity to drink. Since worrying about a designated driver isn’t an issue, it is much easier to pick up a beer and relax. This poses two issues: underage drinking and mass consumption. Without having to drive, many students get the idea that hey, I’m free, I can drink as much as I want! and take it overboard.
I think the busses are great – they offer convenient transportation and stop kids from driving drunk. So what would we rather? More underage drunk kids walking around, or drunk drivers?
1 comment:
The busses encourage drinking with the idea that drunks are safe as long as they aren't driving. But alcohol poisoning took another freshman's life this week, this time at Wabash College in Indiana. It's a small, all-male, liberal arts college. The studnet was a pledge of Delta Tau Delta fraternity, where the party with beer keg was held in the fraternity house. The fraternity has been disbanded. Parents are complaining that the school does not have enough alcohol education, just a "gentleman's rule," meaning the students need to act like gentlemen at all times. What does that mean? Do you think they need more education about the dangers of alcohol? SMU is providing that, but these busses seem to be giving the opposite message. Where do students learn responsible drinking? Is it even possible to avoid these tragedies?
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