Look At It This Way

I'm not Jewish but I do celebrate a Seder meal with friends every year. I heard this year that the local university students were not going to be allowed to have kosher wine for their Seder because it was to be held on campus and some students are under the age of 21. I'm not sure how it turned out. I wonder if the Newman center for the Catholic students are allowed to have wine also for communion. I feel my parents did me a disservice by not talking much about alcohol when I was a kid. They didn't drink and most of our friends didn't drink so I had major misconceptions about alcohol. I had my first wine cooler and first beer at age 20. I grew up a lot that summer. I don't think a sheltered childhood like I had did me any favors. I'm almost 40 and I still feel weird when I drink alcohol in front of my parents.

It is indeed unfortunate that so many parents skip all the most sensitive, vital lessons for living that youngsters desperately need. Perhaps it's because so many of the parents were themselves kept in the dark. This results in one generation after another that, for lack of experience and education, see the world as a dangerous and threatening place...full of evils waiting to pounce. Hardly a firm foundation for the making of a secure and responsible adult. And now there's a university teaching students to fear a glass of ceremonial wine Reefer Madness style. One sip and to Hell they go. Pure piffle!

My parents have a giant bush outside the dining room window and every fall it produces fermented berries. About 5 years ago a few birds started getting drunk off the berries and flying into the glass window. The next year there were more birds and now every fall it is an avian lolapalooza out there! the birds this past fall were so great in number the bush's limbs were close to snapping off. The birds sit there for days at a time getting smashed. My mom has to keep the dining room blinds down to decrease the number of birds that smack into the glass window. The whole scene makes me laugh. I guess even birds need to cut loose now and again.

"Human beings have an inborn need to seek altered states of consciousness."

Why? Because the limbic brain likes it?