Underage drinking

[AtomicEraTom]

Undertow - sounds like it's rough living in Des Moines! Geez!

 

[W-D Forties]

You paint a highly coloured but nevertheless fairly faithful picture of England on a Saturday night. I miss the 'Time - Gentlemen, please!' ting ting. ('Gentlemen', as so often, having a broad-brush interpretation.)

I worked as a barmaid whilst at college and after the ting ting we used to play 'Morning has broken' by Cat Stevens really loud to clear the pub at 11pm! The it was the usual shouts of 'You don;t have to go home but you can't stay here', followed by 'Shift yer asses and give us yer glasses!' This was in Liverpool by the way.

 

[Undertow]

Undertow - sounds like it's rough living in Des Moines! Geez!

Des Moines is a strange place, let's put it that way. Most often, it's just a blip in the Midwest. Between self-obsessed magnates tearing down beautiful historic buildings so they can build some monstrous namesake, and a city council that hires exorbitantly-priced out-of-state consultants who also suggest tearing down historic buildings for things like "green space", Des Moines doesn't have much else to identify itself.

I would say that during daylight hours, Des Moines is a relatively mundane place. Most folks work for some form of corporation or another. Aside from the occasional student or homeless person, the sidewalks are empty. You might see three cars pass between lights in the heart of downtown. A bird might crap on a parked car if things are really shaking.

At night, it all depends on who you're with, and where you are. I've nearly been beaten up and thrown out of neighborhood bars that I didn't "belong" to. I also avoid certain ethnic areas I'm not familiar with, again, because I could meet a beating. Most of downtown is sterilized so that young white yuppies can get drunk and hit with OWI's on the way home - that's how we grease the gubmit motor here.

I ran with a fairly benign crowd, but we had the seasonal trouble maker come through and whip the bored kids into a drug-fueled frenzy. That and Iowa is so full of sleaze and meth that it's not entirely difficult to convince someone to commit a crime around here.

There was one guy, a drifter, that had been following the band Widespread Panic from state to state armed with back pack, hunting knife and hacky sack. He got in with my group for about a week while he was passing through town. In between selling ecstasy and ludes to afford food, he slept in a house on the floor with four of my friends. After the band passed through, he jumped a train IL and evidently met up with someone out there. That next week he was in prison for murdering and raping a little girl in Illinois. Apparently he'd met someone there, befriended them, sold them some drugs and managed to stay the night at their place. Next morning, they woke up and their little girl was dead. That's the kind of thing that comes through this sleepy little town. [huh]

 

[LizzieMaine]

And there are still people who think drugs are "benign."

 

[Undertow]

And there are still people who think drugs are "benign."

This is true.

I'll stand by my support for the legalization of marijuana. (And no, I do not partake.) For better or worse, I put it on par with alcohol. However, one cannot divorce the fact from the drug - marijuana, like alcohol, is a gateway into other dangerous behavior. It's all too easy to want something with a little more edge.

There are far too many innocent people who think drugs are just some cool recreational game. And certainly, it can be that for some people. Unfortunately, as Hunter Thompson once said, "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."

Ignorance and naivete aren't excuses when some doped up maniac kills your kid because you thought he was "cool".

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Wow, do you ever long to get out of the city? It sounds very stressful at night, and bleak during the day to live where you are. (No offense intended, of course.)

 

[Undertow]

Wow, do you ever long to get out of the city? It sounds very stressful at night, and bleak during the day to live where you are. (No offense intended, of course.)

Haha, no offense taken. At some point, I'm going to post a thread of Des Moines history for the sake of breaking our stereotype that we're this cute, if not bland, little midwest town.

There is very much change in the air around here, and we're not sure if it's for better or worse. The entire landscape has literally changed beyond recognition (from street level) in the last ten years. Entire blocks of buildings have been leveled for corporate mega-buildings. For example, the building I currently work in is only five stories tall but stretches four city blocks - imagine all of the buildings that made way for a single building that takes up that kind of space! A road was even gobbled up in the process. Same thing goes for another 5 block section across the street that was replaced by a single corporation.

Rail yards and lines that stretched for miles and filled huge swathes of downtown and the outlying area are all entirely ripped up, paved over and non-existent. The city built an "expressway" through the south end of downtown and utilized the under-used and non-used rail beds as a map for roads and bike trails. As a result, again, a hundred years of rail service was gone in a few years. Keep in mind, Des Moines was once the O'Hare of rail, with our Rock Island Depot serving as hub for passengers from East to West, North to South.

Let me note that Des Moines in the late 1950s, and again in the 1980's was a place of open and outward immorality. Prostitution was rampant, drugs were everywhere, porn shops and seedy clubs literally littered the streets throughout the downtown area. There were at least three full scale pornographic theaters and one "private" pornographic theater in operation. Railyard hobos lived all over the downtown landscape, often sleeping in the open view of passing motorists. As beautiful old theaters were torn down, monolithic steel structures with almost no purpose and even less value were erected in place and remain there mostly empty.

Depending on what side of the social fence you sit, this is either a sign of great progress and rebirth, or a sign of folly. Many in Des Moines who have short roots celebrate this as rebirth. I'm glad we've cleaned things up, but I'm not celebrating the rampant destruction of identity.

(I really need to just post thread with all this info. Sorry for going so far off topic!)

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think people forget that the malign spirit of Robert Moses was abroad in the land thruout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, under the name "Urban Renewal." There are few social movements were ever more misguided, and few have ever had such disastrous results for our civilization. For thirty years, we built a society for cars, not for people -- and now we reap the consequences of that stupidity.

 

[sheeplady]

While I will identify with urban renewal as the scoundrel it is, I'm not sure if anything about it can be fixed. Where I live now they used urban renewal to gut the downtown (building new buildings that remain empty) without enough parking or living space, placing elevated highways right through neighborhoods, and gutting out the slums to replace it with empty lots (which are now part of the larger medical industrial complexTM that occupies that former neighborhood). It was so badly and horrifically planned that it accelerated the flight out of the city, and then the few jobs that existed downtown left. The schools are so bad (one of the city high school has a 45% graduation rate) that nobody with kids wants to move back. And the neighborhoods (particularly a few of them) are so full of violence that the honest people left live in a state of near-terror.

Now they are talking about tearing down the main artery that flows north to south in the city, and brings most of the commuters to work at the three largest employers in the county (the university and two local hospitals). There are supporters for the tear down who say that the elevated highway psychologically cuts the city in half- particularly the university, hospitals and better neighborhoods from the downtown and worse neighborhoods. Personally, I think that this is a little silly and it's not like tearing down a highway is going to magically undo decades of horrific planning, development, and breaking communities up. Besides that, it's going to make traffic a mess.

The other idea was to bury the highway underground, to which I can only say "Big Dig 2.0." Likely they will replace the highway with another built right beside it.

 

[nice hat dude!]

Underage drinking has been around for as long as any of us can remember,don't think it's going to go away anytime soon.So now that we understand this what to do about it?Well I guess we could lock our kids up in a closet till they turned legal aged then all we'd have to deal with is major psychological issues which to some would be a much better option.As parents our job is to educate little Johnny or Sally the best we can,inform them of the facts and dangers of drinking and hope they make it to adulthood to have the same conversation with their kids.I grew up around drinking and my Dad was ok with us drinking my Mom figured we would all go straight to hell.Dad always said if we were at home drinking we wouldn't be out driving around and God knows what else,and then at least they wouldn't have to go to the morgue in the morning to identify one of us.5 boys could be a handful I'm sure.Just a little side note,because a person is legal age that doesn't automatically make them any smarter and legal age should be the age when the government says you are old enough to get killed for your country.Glad we never had that to deal with in Canada.