It’s safe to say that the medical community and I often don’t see eye to eye. What they call a cancerous tumor ravaging an otherwise perfectly healthy body, I like to think of as a super excited lump of meat, just trying to make friends with the rest of your organs as quickly as possible. That’s probably why it’s highly illegal for me to offer unsolicited medical advice to anyone but the irretractably dead anymore.
I’m also often at odds with the “blame everybody but myself”ers who have transformed the over indulgence of every delicious vice and deviance from a lapse in personal responsibility and self control, to a disease, so much bigger than themselves that they can’t possibly be held responsible for their entirely personal actions. When our parents and grand parents were growing up, you didn’t suffer from the disease of alcoholism, you were just fun at parties. You weren’t a sex addict, you just knew how to talk to ladies about how cold your penis was and how selfish it was of them to not share all their warm places. Today anything that you can get yourself in trouble for doing too much of is a debilitating disorder, so completely and utterly out of the sufferer’s control that awareness needs be brought to it by way of a special week dedicated to making others more aware that you’re a victim of biology and toxins and not just an irresponsible ass.
Which brings me to Van Full of Candy’s celebration of “National Prevention Week”! Often with these awareness weeks I don’t hear about them until about halfway through the week and it then seems silly to try to join the festivities when the party’s almost over. So I’m happy as a junkie at a needle exchange that I found National Prevention Week right at the kick off! And as such, all this week I am going to be doing what I can to bring awareness to the peril of having too much fun and then blaming everyone else, up to and including the vengeful demons in your blood that angry up your humors, for your problems with being able to control yourself in the face of fun.
With that in mind, we kick off National Prevention Week festivities today with: Prevention of Underage Drinking! Wooo!
Now, there doesn’t really seem to be much, that I can think of, that I can do to celebrate or bring awareness to this issue. I’m not underage. I mean, I’m under some ages, just not the specific ones I’m fairly certain they’re referencing. I myself didn’t participate in any sort of underage drinking, which is probably why my under ages were boring as hell. So, short of getting a baby drunk and then telling it it’s a bad person, which I’m almost certain is somehow illegal, all I can say on the subject is: the underaged are going to drink. Not all of them mind you, but some of them, and while teens being stupid isn’t necessarily the best thing, we have to accept that it’s going to happen and try to educate on safety and responsibility. I know personal responsibility is a dirty word and it’s much easier to blame the world’s problems on not being able to do anything personally about them, but let’s not be stupid, stupid. Abstinence only education, be it sex based, drug based or alcohol based is not the best way to go about things. Tell a teen not to do something without trusting them as human beings and borderline adult enough to talk seriously about repercussions, but instead just leave them with “Because I the fuck said so” and you’re basically telling them, “There’s this awesome thing that you’re going to get to choose whether or not to do some day on your own, but for no damned good reason I’m forbidding you from doing it now.” And you tell that to anyone, no matter their age, and the natural and correct reaction will be “Fuck you, that sounds like I want it in me!” and how can you blame ’em. So isn’t it better to teach people how to do things responsibly, from someone who has experience with the issue, rather than leaving the teaching up to their peers who don’t know fuck all about what they’re doing and are only compounding the potential dangers with their ignorance?
You were young and stupid once, don’t you wish someone had talked to you like a human being about things before you got out there and did everything wrong? But it’s all uncomfortable and embarrassing and stuff, I know. You’re right, it’s just a whole lot easier for everyone involved to just not talk to your children and blame society later.
So there’s my contribution to National Prevention Week’s Monday festivities. Let’s see what else this week long celebration of awareness holds, shall we?:
Tuesday, May 22nd is “Prevention of Prescription Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Use”
While Wednesday, May 23rd, my actual real life birthday, just happens to fall, unironically, on “Prevention of Alcohol Abuse”
This is going to be the best birthday week EVER!
Who wants to buy me a round of awareness?!