I read in disbelief a recent Colorado Daily that “CU-Boulder officials have launched a two-pronged approach to excessive drinking: prevention on one end, recovery on the other.” And this on top of the editorial on Jan Otto and lobbying conflicts on University Hill.

 

How about that middle part.  Enforcement.  I can speak with experience on the clarifying qualities of jail time.

 

First, though, freshen this for me.  Top shelf.  No ice, no parasol.  Serve from the left.  Now leave…….

 

We agree that a move into a neighborhood known for decades as a wild living college-age sequence of habitations immediately disallows you from slapping your forehead and whining ‘who knew?’  But it’s also true there is no legal entity known as a “college area” that precludes it from obeying the law, or the authorities from enforcing it.  And the city certainly should, given landlords winking at occupancy levels that would blanch Malaysian slavers, Mexican coyotes, and midday HOP drivers, plus numbingly self-centered media-savvy students with earnest delivery and innocent sounding - but utterly false - stories regarding their own recent liquor consumption.  And that of the living room corpse periodically ‘discovered.’  Such neighborhoods are legally no different than any other.  And they should be treated no different.  But they are, of course.

 

The reason is that six entities are in conflict on most Hill related issues: The City (concerned with tax income), the University (concerned with bad press), students (terribly concerned with little), the students’ parents (concerned with their status and the enjoyable infliction of that power….oh, and value for the money), the Business Community including landlords (whose interests begin and end with “ching!”), and the residential homeowners, who want their property to skyrocket in value while numerous professors discuss philosophy at their property fence within hearing of  their children.  Selfishly different, they still have at least one thing in common.

 

They’re all full of it.  Greedy and disingenuous, all contribute to this perpetual town-gown wheeze.

 

One problem is that police and University and the ‘business community’ are terrified of civil lawsuits.  Not law, ethics, right or wrong, life and death.  And the terror is real because, unlike Chesterton’s innocent children who want - and deserve - justice, they’re like Chesterton’s adults: complicit and guilty as hell, and who therefore want compassion.  Especially from the parents of an arrested twenty-one year old pledge master who – if a dropout named Garcia and living in a trailer park - would be looking at years of institutional life for contributing to the delinquencies of minors for underage keg parties.  But not their kid, by God.

 

The Business Community is perfectly willing to let underage people with ID’s sufficient for plausible deniability drink on the Hill till they retch, although preferably in a residential yard or – better! – on Pearl St.  Just not outside their business.  And most definitely the underage must stop at another bar, off Hill, for the last toddy before plowing into a crowd or sideswiping a bicyclist on the way home.  Their ideal Hill is rich kids spending money there - legally or not - but who only riot and visit the bouncing Virtual Loo elsewhere.

  

The financial turgor of the Hill is premised on the sale of booze to underage drinkers.  That’s true in much of Boulder.  So it is in every college town, whatever ludicrous pretensions of ‘checks’ are offered up.  Liquor laws, like our ‘drug’ laws in general, are ridiculously unenforceable, however arbitrarily applied, because a significant plurality or majority scorns them.  They’re stupid, and a danger, in that they have inculcated numerous generations to a lowered regard for law in general and those who enforce it.   Since most freshmen should be 18, about three quarters of CU is probably underage and unable to legally drink, but you’d never know that by the business proposals drawn up or the actual lines around the bars.  Once in ‘dear old CU’ they’re all seen as potential customers, and most are.

 

The solution by “family” restaurants on the Hill designed expressly for the very few people who’d actually visit them without significant parking, is the sort of idea that appeals to Hill Homeowners who want all the students’ cold cash about but none of the problems that adhere to hormones, freedom, fake ID’s.  It’s only a slight exaggeration to suggest they want all the amenities of Chautauqua living at Hostel prices.  Slight.  Listening to connivers trying to up their home value (and mode of living, safety, et al) grates inordinately when they hypocritically pretend to higher ground, even when sometimes in the right.