divine angst

I have always been a firm believer that a dress code is a good thing.

I might be slightly biased—my high school had a rigidly strict dress code forbidding short, jeans, and skirts above the knee, to name a few items. My undergrad institution had a “dress tradition”—men in coat and tie, women in dresses or skirts. Nothing there was ever enforced, but I’d venture to guess that a small majority of students took the tradition into account when dressing in the morning. I know I rarely wore t-shirts or shorts to class (though I wore jeans fairly often); many men on campus wore khaki shorts with a button-down and tie. People tended to take care in their appearance. And that’s a good thing. I’ve found that I concentrate better when I’ve had to make an effort to look nice in the morning.

I, too, am one of those people who think there are certain events EVERYONE should dress for—church, the theatre, appearances in court. Even in the workplace, make sure your clothes reflect the image you want them to. After all, consider this:

“That was the case for Erika Mangrum, owner of the Iatria Spa and Health Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. She recalls sending one employee home to change after she came to work wearing a cropped Playboy T-shirt that showed her stomach and a navel ring.”

I have only one question for that employee: is this EVER acceptable?

Business and schools are implementing dress codes? Good for them. If schools are hiring teachers, and companies hiring employees, who are showing up in inappropriate attire, well, why were they hired in the first place? Teachers, realize that you are the adults students interact with the most. Dress accordingly. Employees, recognize that a sloppy or trashy look is not appealing to customers. Buy an iron and hide your tattoos. Take pride in your appearance.

This crap really infuriates me. I particularly like this bit:

Most research defines “binge drinking” as having five or more drinks in a row, without counting how far past five the drinkers go.

The Berkeley, California-based nonprofit health research institute found that many of the 1,000 male college drinkers surveyed said they had 24 or more drinks in a row.

“These are levels of drinking at which most men will have passed out or become comatose,” said Paul Gruenewald, who led the study.

Well, sure, if someone consumes 24 drinks in a couple of hours, they will indeed be comatose. But the researchers didn’t specify over what period of time these young men had these 24 drinks.

There are two glaring problems with this sort of news article. The first is that these reports are so vague that anyone who drinks could be considered a binge drinker. After all, binge drinking is defined as “five or more drinks in a row” So does this mean that, at a tailgate party that could last up to four hours, a young man who has a six-pack is a binge drinker? I guess that means my husband and my father are both binge drinkers, too, then, and most of our friends, and, oh yes, me. Or how about a group out at a nice restaurant for three or so hours, who have several bottles of wine. Those people must be binge drinkers as well.

So that’s problem one—vague reporting that equates to fear-mongering.

Problem two: The attitude towards drinking taken by these researchers and/or reporters only serves to worsen the issue. Remember—alcohol in itself isn’t bad. It’s when it is abused that problems arise. More concretely, the heaviest drinkers I know often grew up in very strict households where alcohol was absolutely forbidden. What happens when you tell a kid they can’t have something? They want it more. Turn that around, and the people I know with the healthiest attitudes about drinking were often exposed to it at an early age—by seeing their parents drink responsibily at meals and perhaps being given, for instance, a small glass of wine with dinner.

The fact is that college students drink. They are not going to stop drinking—the genie is way out of the bottle, no pun intended. So what is the solution? Make college students more responsible drinkers. And the way to do that is not to broadcast how dangerous binge drinking is, telling the world how awful it is. No, instead, we should provide college students opportunities to show that they can be responsible with alcohol in adult settings. My undergrad institution used to have a tradition of “Thursday Night Kegs”—students and faculty would join together on Thursday nights, in common campus areas, to socialize and have a few drinks. Liability issues forced the administration to ban kegs from campus. Since the ban, hard liquor use on campus has drastically risen, and more occurences of alcohol poisoning are reported every year.

See, when the students were placed in an adult context with other adults, socializing and drinking responsibly, everyone had a good time. No, that’s not to say there were no problems—there are always problems. But the problems were fewer.

If we want college students to act like responsible, adult drinkers, we need to treat them like responsible adult drinkers. Treating them like children who are bound to get into trouble will only encourage them to test the waters.

Morning Edition on NPR had a piece this morning about Catholics being given permission to vote for candidates who support abortion rights without the act of voting for that person being a grave sin.

Frankly, the Catholics I know who are worried about the various and sundry things their bishops “permit” them to do are not the ones who also want to vote for John Kerry. I was pleased to hear that a Catholic priest and theology professor at Notre Dame felt the same way.

Maybe I’ve been away from the Catholic Church for too long, but this morning it struck me how odd and alien the even theoretical structure of the church is (when it comes to those on the bottom rungs, the parishioners). The men and women who tithe their money to pay for programs and buildings and priests’ salaries are supposed to also be subject to letters and memos from their bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, telling them what is the appropriate behavior in any number of situations.

So let’s imagine a small group Catholics, sitting in their pews, agonizing over the upcoming election—they feel the war in Iraq is bad or badly run, they oppose the death penalty, they feel strongly about social justice and social programs. In other words, they dont’ want to vote for GWB. But John Kerry supports abortion rights. To be “true” and “good” Catholics, they have to then vote against their consciences.

It’s all moot anyway. The Catholics who are most concerned about what their bishop allows them to do and not to do are the same ones who believe that abortion is the greatest evil our nation is facing today—because that’s what the Church has told them. I wish the Church would start looking at some other issues that are related and important—like the death penalty, which John Paul II opposes and our current president heartily endorses. Or human rights violations, or child abuse, or even the ever-increasing divorce rate. These are all social issues Catholics should have a strong opinion on. But the issue they focus the most on? Abortion.