| funkyhoney |
11-09-2009 08:51 AM |
My brain hurts after writing this in one take. I need to go back when I'm well-rested and make it funny and more opinionated.
‘Alcohol related death/abuse/injury.’ When was the last time you saw that headline or one just like it? How about ‘teenage drinking epidemic,’ or something about the correlation of alcohol and violence? Some time in the last week or two, I’m sure.
I think that it’s very fair to say that alcohol has been a part of human life for almost as long as recorded history itself; with Egyptian pictographs being one prominent example and even the Bible itself lending evidence of a BC drinking culture. Suffice to say, people have enjoyed getting sloshed and enjoying themselves for longer than any of us care to imagine. It’s hard not to ask whether or not partakers of alcohol use would lend themselves to violence and urban abuse, or was it a more civilised time?
You don’t have to go back far to find that drinking alcohol used to be a more refined pursuit, with the occasional moron flailing through and ruining it for the rest of us. However, one has to ask when generations as a whole began to decline in moral standards? Why more and more people feel the need to engage in violent behaviour on a massive scale? And whether or not alcohol use is a catalyst or merely a bi-product of today’s drinking culture.
With the evolution of technology, so came mass production of alcohol, starting with wine and simple fermented beverages and eventually working up into complex distillation processes. But somewhere along the line people lost (or perhaps found) their way with the advent of currency and alcohol production, distribution and service became a lucrative, capitalist business. I’m fairly confident when I say this is where part of the alcohol-related problems began. By that of course I mean when people had to pay for booze, the possibility of running out of money became an outcome and frustration and violence would surely ensue.
By turning drinking alcohol into a standalone business in the food and beverage world, people were able to invent pubs and bars, which is probably about the same time that “session drinking” reared it’s head. As this was the only place you could effectively get drunk, sessions declined into early incarnations of binges with the 20th century’s 6 o’clock swill being a huge example. Only open until 6? No problem! Just buy ten at once. Undoubtedly this caused quite a bit of havoc in bars around Australia. Although while binging would be defined as “drinking to get drunk,” and this was certainly that, at least there was some justification behind it. On the same token, this is early proof that shortening opening hours generally acts to make alcohol abuse more prominent.
With patrons sitting idly about doing nothing in particular other than downing hooch, some bright spark came up with idea of not only starting a company to claim a slice of the action, but to start buying up other companies. I’m going to pretend his name was “Mr. Fosters,” and his descendants are now some of the richest people around. In a stroke of marketing genius, rather than selling a single product indefinitely, he bought existing products and sold them in addition to his own. It’s interesting to note that at the moment in Australia, with the exception of South Australia’s Coopers brewery, every single major brewery is owned by the Foster’s Group or Lion Nathan. This certainly makes the notion of brand loyalty a joke, however the facts tell otherwise.
Today, branding makes the problem of alcohol abuse in youths worse. Less and less are people drinking because they enjoy the drink, or even because they enjoy the social interaction that generally follows it. It’s now nothing but a marketing game, devious in it’s simplicity. Smirnoff? Bundaberg? Jim Beam? All are terrible, mass produced products for the simple purpose of generating revenue for their manufacturers, but a little bit of simple marketing makes fools of anyone without the sense to realise. I like to call these people drones. It’s not even a hard notion to understand; look at Coca-Cola’s advertising campaigns, it’s not selling a product, it’s selling a lifestyle to people gullible enough to believe it, the same applies directly to alcohol.
Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, marketing is a fickle game and any way you can get an edge, you have to take advantage of. But on the other hand I think to myself that it’s a sad state of affairs when people are too stupid to see what’s going on around them. It’s just unfortunate that a lot of spiffy marketing suits choose to target impressionable middle-teens. You would hope that by the time most people are past adolescence they will see the error of their ways, but while you can make laws to restrict alcohol advertising, you can’t legislate against stupidity.
It’s obvious that generation-to-generation ideals change a great deal, but why all of a sudden now is alcohol seen to be a problem? Is it the fault of marketing? The mass media? Poor parenting? Technology? Or is it something less well-defined, more of an umbrella or blanket issue? All I’m saying is that alcohol no more of a danger than a car is. And by that I mean it is a potential danger and there is a huge difference.
Alcohol isn’t a necessity, it’s a privilege, and like any privilege it comes with certain responsibilities. People who aren’t prepared to accept these responsibilities are the ones you see making a public nuisance of themselves and abusing others. The question is less ‘what can be done to stop this’ and more ‘why is this behaviour inherent in certain people.’
With the way alcohol has developed as a business and culture has evolved around constantly changing technology, it’s not hard to see how people can have a warped perception on alcohol consumption. The first question to ask, however, is what exactly is the problem?
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