Turning Wine Into Water

My name is Mark, and I’m a teetotaler.

Yep. Dictionary.com’s word of the day on April 21, 2001, a teetotaler — for those of you not up on your temperance jargon — is “a person who abstains totally from intoxicating drink.”

(And, yes, Carlos. That includes tequila.)

Don’t touch it, don’t want to. Never have, never will. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Now.

With that in mind, let me also say that more than one of my friends has celebrated — or will celebrate — his or her 21st birthday this year. Which, yes, has put — and will put — your teetotaling columnist in a bit of an awkward position.

Johnny O’s, after all, was not exactly built for the sober.Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here [1] to listen to or to download it.

I wonder sometimes, usually when I’m on my fifth (free) bottle of Aquafina, making sure that a given amigo doesn’t abruptly hit the deck after his fifth (and decidedly un-free) shot of aqua vitae, if fellow hootch-hater Carrie Nation didn’t have the right idea back when ’07 was short for 1907.

“Born Carrie Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky,” Wikipedia explains, “Nation got her myth-making last name from her second husband, David Nation. A large woman (nearly 6 feet tall and 175 pounds), she described herself as ‘a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,’ and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars.”

(Hey — it’s a thought. Besides, it’s not like a little change of scenery ever hurt anybody.)

Before every establishment in Collegetown goes on Bible-and-hatchet watch, however, I should assure you that yours truly is, alas, no ax-brandishing, booze-banishing bulldog.

While growing up in one of the nearly 50 dry counties in the great state of Texas (Morris County, to be exact), the high school-aged me wrote a letter to the editor to the local newspaper imploring my 13,000 or so neighbors to repeal the law that banned the sale of alcohol within county lines — something, needless to say, of which Ms. Nation would not have approved.

The reason I did it, of course, was not because I wanted to encourage people to drink; after all, I hold alcohol in roughly the same (dis)regard as any self-respectin’, card-carryin’ member of the Prohibition Party. I just thought then, as now, that the Bible works better sans the hatchet (especially when it’s up to Uncle Sam to wield the latter).

“Government exists,” as Ronald Reagan put it, “to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

I tend to agree.

Keeping the sauce off store shelves is only effective in moving sales to the backroom — right, Mr. Capone?

Right indeed. Bringing back the Eighteenth Amendment is not and never has been a dream of mine. Convincing people to abide by the principle behind it, however — well, yeah, that’s a different story.

“[F]or men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise, “they are his property, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure ...” Thus, Locke continued, each man among us is not only “bound to preserve himself,” but should likewise do everything in his power “to preserve the rest of mankind.”

See where I’m going here?

As some — nay, all — of you have noticed by now, there is a common theme running throughout my denunciation of the Devil’s buttermilk (of which, to be sure, the term “the Devil’s buttermilk” is itself a part): Providence, religion, the Big Man Upstairs. And this, I readily concede, is no accident. I make no bones about the fact that, for me, faith plays a big part in the decision to forgo the spirits down below to stay focused on another Spirit up above.

Now, granted, faith does not affect all of us the same way. I understand that. That’s O.K. Faith does not affect some of us at all. I understand that, too. That’s also O.K. But what I do not understand is why — faith aside — anyone would want to mess around with water’s fierier counterpart in the first place.

I mean, really: we’re talking about some pretty nasty stuff. And I don’t just mean the taste.

Here, if you’ll forgive me, Dear Reader, are the facts, pulled straight from the website for the American Medical Association:

— Underage drinking is a factor in nearly half of all teen automobile crashes, the leading cause of death among teenagers.

— Alcohol use contributes to youth suicides, homicides and fatal injuries — the leading cause of death among youth after auto crashes.

— Alcohol abuse is linked to as many as two-thirds of all sexual assaults and date rapes of teens and college students.

— Alcohol is a major factor in unprotected sex among youth, increasing their risk of contracting HIV or other transmitted diseases.

Sobering, aren’t they?

I promise — I did not write this column to ruin your Friday. I wrote it because, while the Gipper was right to assert that the government has no place trying to protect me from myself or you from yourself, he sure as heck didn’t say anything about it being wrong for We the People to try to protect each other.

So.

Before you go to happy hour this weekend, stop and think about whether what you’ll find there will really — ultimately — make you happy.

That, in the end, is all this would-be preacher asks.

Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu [2]. If You Can Keep It usually appears Thursdays.