National Youth Rights Association

Post edited 3:29 am – May 20, 2012 by wedway

Liam said:

I've emailed before, and I don't really monitor this website regularly but I'd be willing to bet my email probably made its way to the "wacky emails of the week" page just like "Paul" over here. But introductions aside, I agree though with this whole point being asinine. Wait until you're 21 to drink. I did it, you can do it too. The law itself is not hurting anyone, people failing to follow it are hurting people.

You made a decision to wait until you were 21 to drink. If you were willing to tolerate being discriminated against based solely on the number of years you lived, that's fine by me, but step out of the way of people who deem the current drinking age an unacceptable institution. The law isn't hurting anyone, what the hell?! Way to put a spin on the cliche "if you obey the law, then you won't have a problem" argument, which is just another way for authorities to make people accept being oppressed. If the law is so unenforceable and unrespectable that people frequently don't follow it, then the law is hurting people! The current drinking age, whether you care to realize it or not, is hurting far more people than it saves.

I mean drinking alcohol is damn sure not going to make you any better at driving a vehicle, but it won't make you any better at joining the military and going to war either and that always gets thrown around as some strange justification to lowering the drinking age.

The fact that the government can ship young people overseas to fight wars for a country that won't even treat them as equals at home is a "strange justification" to you?

Ultimately, the law itself isn't broken. What's broken is the mentality of America's youth and those who wish to further encourage the idea that if you complain about something enough then it will change. That, contrary to popular belief, is not what democracy means. What America's youth need to be taught is that following laws and having the discipline to do something every now and then you don't agree with are inevitable parts of being an adult.

The U.S. government is meant to defend the rights of every citizen equally. When the government is failing to do this with laws such as the drinking age, expect people to speak out against it. They have in the past (Civil Rights Movement, Women's Suffrage, etc.) and they'll do it again, all the while people with mindsets such as yours continue to rage the war against equality under the law. Contrary to what you describe, being subjected to injustice and acting passive in regards to it is not part of being an adult. It takes a great deal of maturity to stand up for your rights. If anyone's mentality is broken, it's yours.

Your ability to see the bigger picture and do what's expected of you without having to be told is what makes you a mature adult, not how many alcoholic beverages you've already had before you're even old enough to drink legally.

Stop and think for a moment about how much the world would suck if all people throughout history just always did what was expected of them and did as they were told on the grounds that it is "what makes you a mature adult." Yeah, enjoy your little fantasy where slavery is still legal, women cannot vote, and the Nazis successfully obliterated the Jews. But hey, at least they were all mature adults!

There's really no way to find this out 100% but I have a theory that 90% of America's alcoholics have probably been drinking in some capacity since before the age of 15 and a good percentage of those people's parents were probably trying to "expose them early and teach responsibility." Like I said, I can't prove that even though I would be willing to be it's the case and the irony is one of the most popular suggestions on how to teach kids moderation is actually creating the very issue the drinking age of 21 was put in place to prevent.

Don't just pull statistics out of your ass. It is a sad attempt, on your part, to blur the line between myth and reality. That entire assumption of yours is nowhere even close to the truth. Do some actual research before you go spewing your opinions. And if you think that the drinking age is helping to combat alcoholism, think again. It is a common excuse among alcoholics to attempt to justify their alcoholism by blaming it on the fact that they started drinking at an early age. The current drinking age makes it very easy for them to use this excuse. How is the drinking age helping these people, exactly? By giving them more excuses to justify their illness? And what does this have to do with young people and their rights? You're referring to alcoholics far over the age of 21, older adults who are making a conscious decision to abuse alcohol. From the sounds of it, it'd make more sense for the government to ban alcohol for alcoholics than for young people. After all, alcohol does a lot more harm to them than it does young people. Don't try and pinpoint the issue of alcoholism on a lack of enforcement of the drinking age, especially if all you have are phony statistics to back up your claim.

The sheer ignorance and lack of logic in your posts is disturbing, to say the least. Please learn about the subject at hand before posting and spare yourself from further embarrassment. 

EDIT: I see you made another post before I had time to post mine. You claim to believe that the drinking age is a non-issue. Alright, fine, but what constitutes a non-issue to you? Does there really, in your mind, need to be some sort of mass genocide before anything is worth getting done? The fact is that this is an issue worth being addressed. Don't try and tell me that, in a society that glorifies alcohol in every form of a holiday or social gathering, that isolating young people from the rest of society in this manner is a non-issue. Oh, it's a non-issue? Tell that to all of the young people who have been arrested or imprisoned for engaging in an activity that the rest of society engages in every day without problem. Tell that to the families of people who have lost loved ones to drunk drivers because the current drinking age prevented any better legislation combating drunk driving from passing. I'm sure the friends of people who died of alcohol poisoning because they were too afraid to seek medical attention due to fear of being convicted for underage drinking would like to hear how this is a "non-issue." And don't forget the rape victims who were afraid to report their rape to authorities due to the fact that they were drinking alcohol at the time. Families who have been forcibly torn apart because the parents allowed their teenage son a little wine at dinner. If you think the drinking age is a non-issue, YOU SUCK. Any instances of injustice, inequality, and segregation in our country are instances that need addressed. We take the drinking age very seriously, despite your attempts to trivialize it as a "non-issue."

Liam said:

Again, explain to me how this qualifies as oppression. You do not need alcohol to survive.

Wow, you really still think this is about alcohol, don't you? It is robbing young people of their right to equality under the eyes of the law, which is oppressive. By your logic, the government should be able to break into your home and seize your computer. It's not oppression, you don't need a computer to survive!

Nobody is treating anybody unequally. My fellow servicemen are citizens of the U.S. as well and they uphold themselves accordingly. And again keep telling me how we in the military are all "shipped overseas to fight wars" when I've been in 5 years and have not once set foot in Afghanistan or Iraq.

I never said that everyone in the military is shipped off, do not shove words in my mouth. Again, whether or not you are personally shipped off is not the issue. The issue lies in the fact that every single young person, in the event of either volunteered service or a draft, has the potential to be shipped off to serve their country by a government that has no respect for their right to equality under the law at home. If the government views young people as competent enough to fight in whatever international squabbles they've gotten into, then it's an absurd notion to, at the same time, call them incapable of handling alcohol.

So, you're telling me just because I graduated boot camp I qualify for things other people my age don't? I could fix computers at some stateside base for a four year enlistment but because I wear a uniform I automatically rate something other 18-20 year olds don't? That is YOUR idea of equality?

You keep missing the point entirely! Not just military people under the age of 21 should be allowed to drink, any person that the government deems as competent enough to serve should be allowed! Being in the military does not entitle a young person to drink, their potential for military service does!

Or no wait, maybe you're referring to 19 year old who not even a year before his first deployment was still in high school, and now he comes back from whatever combat zone with PTSD, you wanna send him to a bar. Someone emotionally vulnerable and liable to begin a dependency on alcohol and you wanna send them to drink their sorrows away. No you make perfect sense.

Yeah, don't allow the 19 year old military veteran to go to a bar to drink their sorrows away, we reserve that for the soldiers who are over 21! You're thinking under the assumption that a young soldier would be completely incapable of using alcohol without abusing it. Did you ever think that they want to have a drink with friends to, I don't know, celebrate his arrival home? How did you even ponder this idea without the scenario playing out in your head of a military veteran getting turned away from a bar for being deemed "too immature" for alcohol after just returning home from defending his country?!

Just out of curiosity how many service members do you know? What are their opinions on this? I've served with hundreds (and I'm not "pulling that number out of my ass") and they all could care less what the drinking age is (yes it's been talked about once or twice). So, why don't you stop trying to speak for a demographic who may or may not even agree with you.

I never once claimed to be speaking for service members, again with the shoving words down my throat! It is a fact that young service members serve their country but are not allowed to drink alcohol, claiming that me stating this fact somehow represents the opinion of all service members is truly stupid. So, apparently, because the select few service members you supposedly know do not care about the drinking age, then that must speak for the entire demographic of service members! Yeah, who's doing the speaking, again?

"Yeah, enjoy your little fantasy where slavery is still legal, women cannot vote, and the Nazis successfully obliterated the Jews."

Please, please show me in my text where I said that I'm racist, sexist, or even anti-Semitic for that matter. The only thing I'm referring to is the drinking age, not the Holocaust, not civil rights, not slavery.

I'm never accused you of any of that stuff, again with the shoving words down my throat! I said that, if any of those groups of people had simply done what they were told and what society expected of them, then they never would have been liberated from the oppression that they had suffered under! Society expected slaves to accept being property, society expected women to be silent in politics and stay home and pop out babies, and society (Nazi Germany) expected the Jews to be shipped to concentration camps to their deaths!

I know nobody necessarily ASKED for it, but I tried to write a response and people either spit out some secondhand trash about "Going to war at 18 but you can't drink" or they change the subject to some historical event that has nothing to do with anything I've said. Shoot, maybe in my next response I can bring up Boxer's Rebellion or maybe even Gettysburg.

Maybe they keep spitting out that "secondhand trash" because it actually carries some meaning?! Although you fail to grasp that, as you do the historical perspectives to be offered as examples of past oppressed groups and their eventual liberations. But just because you fail to understand the concept does not make it irrelevant!

So let me make this very clear, my point is not that we as a nation don't need to stand up for what is right and fight against oppression, my point is that there are bigger issues out there that need attention.

Then you go fight those issues and stop wasting your time here if you think so little of them. Hurry along now, you're wasting precious time when you could be helping to find Kony!

"Don't just pull statistics out of your ass. It is a sad attempt, on your part, to blur the line between myth and reality."

Again, I clearly stated that is just my own theory based on all the alcoholics I've known in 23 years ( I may not have stated the based on people I've known part, my bad). I don't know what drove them to alcoholism, so it makes me wonder how many of them could have started because their parents wanted to expose them to it early or teach them moderation. There's this thing called reading comprehension I'm thinking you should probably look into.

So you didn't pull statistics out of your ass, you just, err, pulled statistics out of your ass. You made up statistics. That's what you did. It doesn't matter your reasoning behind doing it! And they were incredibly incorrect and ignorant statistics, I might add.

Actually you're all probably going to benefit from that, maybe then you won't take one thing I'm saying and make it into something completely different/ unrelated.

There is a large difference between misunderstanding your claims and just flat out disagreeing with them. But you seem to think that your arguments are so logical that we couldn't possibly disagree with them without there being some form of miscommunication or another, hmm? What you perceive as unrelated on my part, I perceive as sheer ignorance to the issues on your part.

Liam, I'm done trying and refute your nonsense as you are clearly immune to hearing any new ideas that may contradict your absurd preconceptions. Your mind is clearly already made up in regards to the drinking age and there's no sense in me bothering you with pesky facts. What such an anti youth rights individual like yourself is doing on a youth rights forum is beyond me. Oh wait, no it's not because you're just an obvious failing troll. I don't mind feeding a troll every once in a while, but the troll at least has to be remotely interesting. This debate, however, has become rather stale rather quickly. You've completely disregarded anything I've posted in favor of hearing only what you want to hear. The NYRA website has an entire webpage set up dedicated to outlining NYRA's stance on the drinking age and the issue as a whole where you can decide for yourself whether or not the facts are worth listening to. But knowing you and your immunity to logic and reasoning, you'll simply further disregard these facts in favor of your own irrational presumptions. Your posts are a waste of cyberspace, educate yourself before boring us with your rubbish. I'll just let the rest of the forum community have at you, that is, if you're even worth it to the rest of them. But if you're not, I don't blame them. It's been a displeasure and a waste of my time conversing with you. 

Post edited 6:29 pm – May 25, 2012 by Concealed Weapon

Liam said:

My intention was to come on the website, find said cunt bag's email address, and kindly send an email asking them to put a lid on it because I'm offended by somebody slandering the names of people who died for their freedoms.

I just learned from reading this that saying that a group of people deserves freedom is slandering them. As a supporter of equal rights for everyone, I must have slandered thousands of people.

You’re just whining because you want a better seat on the bus. It’s not the end of the world if you have to sit in the back. Stop acting like you’re oppressed. – A clone of Liam from a century ago.