We Are Not What We Wear

Is teen drinking ever not a problem? Can it ever be done in moderation or a controlled setting? To sound like your mother:

There's been a story winding its way through the Boston papers the past five weeks about a suburban teenager who tragically died while leaving a keg party in the woods one weekend night. She said she'd be fine leaving alone, apparently got lost and a few days later, her body was found in a swampy part of the woods. Unsurprisingly, local police departments became tougher on teenage parties, busting a few of them since then, including one this weekend that, disturbingly, was populated by high-schoolers drinking beer and smoking pot all while wearing the commemorative bracelets created to honor the girl who died. One of the cars in the driveway had a memorial to the girl drawn in its back window, said one of the local police sergeants!

Now, I'm not a Puritan. I occasionally drank in high school and went to a few keg parties in the woods (though thankfully my sister's Bat Mitzvah coincided with the one the cops disrupted, because, knowing my inability to be crafty, I surely would've been arrested). I also spent part of my slow day at work trying to think if anything similar happened while in high school and remembered a classmate was seriously injured in a car accident where a friend was speeding and, yes, I probably sat in a speeding car after this happened. (Though, I'm too timid of a person to drive recklessly.) Nonetheless, what these teenagers are doing is disappointing at best, genuinely disturbing and upsetting to me. Your friend/classmate dies because of unsupervised, underage drinking when 85 percent of the people in the room/forest don't know how to be moderate around alcohol and you continue drinking at parties little more than a month later?! Don't you think there would at least be a six-month period where everyone would be too scared to drink?

Most reports have mentioned the girl's mother, out of disgust, made the teenagers wearing the commemorative bracelets remove them after their arraignment. Good for her. To end on the petty (and apologies to my friends who wear such bracelets): It's funny how the profound gets reduced to these symbolic rubber bracelets that signify (accessorize?) rather than really mean. Why are these bracelets even necessary? Do you really need to wear them to prove you're a devoted supporter of X cause? Why not know internally you're one and live your life accordingly. We're not what we wear.

Thanks to Fugazi for the post's adapted title.