One (Or More) For The Road

 Bear with me: this is my first proper post here at The Rostra, and it’s a long one.

The nightly post-work commute on public transit back home is usually a pretty inocuous and routine event: make sure the connections are made and and apart from late bus arrivals, which around here is always a possibility, hardly anything of note ever happens.

However, about a week ago or so, as I entered my connecting bus, sitting at the front was a dude who was drunk beyond belief. Most of the bus’s capacity patronage kept away from him and quietly or even loudly laughed at his inebriated antics. He loudly accused those sitting near him of talking smack about him. When he got a call on his cell phone, he was nearly screaming into his phone about an acquaintance who was a “total cocksucker.” It finally became too much for those seated near him when, as the bus rounded a turn, he fell from a seated position onto those sitting across from him at the front, which included some chaps who were a whole lot bigger than he was. He very nearly got his ass kicked that night. And here are some other details of note: he was in his mid-twenties, well dressed and hardly working class or a vagrant, and it was 9:30 PM on a Thursday night. A well-off suburbanite trashed on a weeknight.

All of this got me thinking about the place alcohol has in our society. I live in a city in Canada that is currently booming due to oil, and with it comes a booming population and new wealth. And every time I see these local nouveau riche, it seems that they are perfectly content on pissing away all their new money on new SUVs, over-priced clothing and getting trashed every night. And while there is always that segment of the population that has its problems with alcohol that get the public’s attention, it seems that the binge drinker is now gunning for the spotlight. Remember the Blue Mile? Sporting had hardly anything to do with that.

But it doesn’t stop there: I overhear kids in Junior High (!) talking about how trashed they got the previous weekend. So is this it? The ultimate quest for the week’s labours is to get ripped beyond recognition? For me, I think this situation getting out of hand. Although we’re hardly alone in this, should we just passively accept it, like typical Canadians, and then deal with once it’s a huge issue? I hope I’m not alone in feeling something should be done about it.