More on Hazing
I can't really condone the infliction of physical pain or injury as part of hazing or initiation rites ("Do unto others....," you know), but for those who wish to get their anthropological freak on, I say get to it. Young people need their bacchanals and their ritualized public humiliations. So long as they are going through these things as parts of groups, there's a kind of validation and safety in numbers. (There's also a false sense of impunity and a very real one of recklessness in numbers, but that's the consequence of a lack of character and good breeding.)

Apparently, the [currently-famous] hazing incident involving the girls from that suburban Chicago high school was fueled by alcohol provided by some of their parents. Naturally, this will lead to a slew of wankerous tort cases ---none of which will take into consideration the issues of free will and the desire for group participation, or the relative safety of the location where the hazing took place or the interests of adult chaperoning of such activities.

No government or authority in a free society will prevent young people from getting drunk or high with their peers. Where the possibility of such rebellious and debauched behavior is absent there is no life. The occasional and ritualized acceptance of drunken and silly behavior ---as part of some rite of passage or as an unanalyzed gesture to the rule of peer approval--- is a sign of healthy socialization.

When I was the age these girls are now ---16 and 17--- there was probably nothing more important to me than to be included with my group of friends in a night of prowling through our neighborhoods' creeks and dead-ends, getting drunk and listening to music with each other in places no parent would think to find us. We took stupid chances and upset a few garbage cans or road signs or whatever, but I think we did all of that then because we knew we weren't going to be doing it now. We governed ourselves in large part, only sometimes going over the line in cruelty, but we survived. I suppose we could have "survived" by even higher standards of lawfulness, but what a boring lot of bastards we'd be.

Ultimately, the only thing to be regretted from those few years of teenaged rebellion (and, God, what middle-class Caucasoids we were about it, too!) is the legacy of drink. I like to think that my own peer group was an anomaly because such a disproportionate share of them were the very best and brightest minds our whole city had to offer ---and, yet, there is no question that their behavior was that of alcoholics. Was drinking their way of damping down the pressures of the expectations placed on them? I can't say. I was never in their league. And, besides, my own choices in addiction (made shortly thereafter) cannot be ameliorated or justified by comparison.

Those girls up near Chicago need to think long and hard about whether they, too, want to take refuge in alcohol or anything else. Every statistic I see says that binge-drinking is on the upswing among the college-aged set, especially for young women. Who knows what vulnerabilities they're open to when they embrace a life of alcoholism? Enjoy your youth, ladies, but don't forget your selves.