William — My post of 4:02 pm had an error, too: Obviously, I meant to say “did NOT realize.”

To get to your statements:

Yes, I hastily took your inquiry to be a prelude to a patronizing response to my anger about drunk driving. I apologize.

I’m not convinced there has to be a drinking age. In fact, I’m not convinced that the persons who push for one really even want one; they might simply think they can’t secure the serious laws they would prefer.

Yes — this exchange of ours began in discussion of Mr. Kimball’s article about the drinking age; but the more I think about it, the more I realize how much that article angered me. Mr. Kimball thinks the drinking age of 21 is silly? Maybe he’s right. Maybe any drinking age is silly — but by what measures would he inhibit the drunken crossing of highway center-lines at sixty miles an hour into opposing traffic?

You know what I propose: death — to anyone caught drunk driving. Let me add horsewhipping of anyone otherwise drunk in public — because we’re not going to wait to see whether he falls out of a window and onto someone else. (My comments above notwithstanding, there’s little point in a death penalty for plunging fatally from a dorm room.)

Maybe I’ve made myself clear: The drinking age strikes me as quite possibly a non-issue — a distraction. Additionally, the problems it is intended to address are connected to other problems. The campus drinking nonsense, for instance, is probably to some extent a result of our quasi-socialistic educational system. Administrators are now simply parasites, who live on a percentage of the “student aid” for which we are all forced to co-sign and who become, in effect, government agents, their actions to control their supposed domains circumscribed by Constitutional concerns. Eunuchs can hardly be expected to deal with nonsense in the manner of men.