The Easy/Hard Game

Let's play a game that I call "Easy/Hard". Make a list of things that are easy and another list of things that are hard. The question is, why do we ever do the things that are hard? Easy is much better, isn't it?

In my experience, people who do hard things more and easy things less are happier.

Some things that are easy:

• Watching television
• Masturbating

Some things that are hard:

• Getting an education
• Marriage and children

Alcohol belongs on the "easy" list of course. In fact it's at the top of the list of "easy" things we do. If we want to be happy, we should be doing the "hard" things not the "easy" ones.

Brain Eating Disease

We don't consume alcohol so much as alcohol consumes us. We don't abuse it so much as it abuses us.

We think we're in control of alcohol, but we're not. Like a brain parasite from some science fiction magazine, it takes control and sooner or later turns us into zombie drinking machines.

Here is a quote from alcoholrehab.com:

Alcohol is a type of drug known as a depressant. This means that it inhibits certain receptors in the brain and the result of this is that there is a depressive effect on the central nervous system. It is hardly surprising then that chronic alcohol abuse leads the individual to develop depression. The irony is that many of these individuals will be using alcohol already as a means to escape depressive symptoms. While they may initially feel like they are getting some reprieve they are actually making things worse.

So it's a vicious cycle. We're depressed, so we drink, which makes us more depressed, so we drink some more. This is why I call alcohol "our unfaithful friend". We turn to it for help but it stabs us in the back.

Made in China

We just finished rebuilding our basement stairs. We bought cheap wooden treads (pine) at Home Depot. They were made in China.

How is it that it's cheaper to make a heavy, low-tech product like a stair tread half a world away and ship it here? If you follow Fox News, you "know" that it's because American workers are lazy, stupid, and overpaid. I would add that they are also drunks.

I'm 65 years old, and I have decades of experience as both an employee and employer. Whatever workers may be, it's a much bigger problem for America when managers and executives are lazy, stupid, overpaid drunks.

OK, I hear you. "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" It's because when I had the chance as an owner of a small business, I was a lazy, stupid, underpaid drunk. At least I wasn't overpaid, give me that.

American workers may believe that they are "entitled", but managers and executives believe that in spades. For executives to be casting aspersions on workers is a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Whether you're a worker or management, if you drink, you're likely to believe that someone else is the problem. Alcohol, your "unfaithful friend" as I call it, whispers in your ear that you can avoid responsibility and indulge yourself in fantasies without suffering the annoyance of obvious facts. 

The world does depend on you after all. You can't, as Ayn Rand suggested in Atlas Shrugged, hide out in your protected enclave and let the rest of the world go to pot. In the Book of Luke Jesus says, "But someone who does not know, and then does something wrong, will be punished only lightly. When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required."

Managers and executives, stop drinking now and do your job.

The Last Supper

According to Christian belief, Jesus offered bread and wine to his disciples at the "Last Supper" before he was crucified, and so the drinking of wine has become part of the Christian rite of communion.

If you're in the business of selling alcohol, what more could you ask for than to place it at the center of the world's most influential religion? It is literally endorsed by God.

Does God really want us to use alcohol? I think not, considering that it tends to lead us away from everything that religion tries to teach.

Using alcohol is not OK. It's the principal reason that we act stupidly and make ourselves and everyone around us unhappy. Christianity should reject alcohol use absolutely.

Hornswoggled

You know the feeling. You've just come out of the convenience store and you realize that you gave a twenty but only got change for a ten. Or worse, you discover that you've invested your retirement savings with a crook and now instead of retiring you have to work at Walmart the rest of your life.

You've been cheated. Even when only a little bit of your life has been stolen from you, it's a horrifying and debilitating feeling. If you've lost a lot, it can be excruciating.

Alcohol is a massive scam that robs you of your life every bit as much as the convenience store clerk or the investment swindler. If you stop drinking long enough to see what it has done to you, you're going to have that awful feeling that you've been "hornswoggled". Alcohol is the most vicious con of them all.

That knot in your stomach, the cold chills, when the realization hits you that you've been cheated, I call it the "awakening". It's just about the worst feeling ever, enough to drive you to drink. And that's probably what you'll do, any time you wake up sober with reality staring you cold in the face like your worst zombie nightmare. Have a drink, get back on the train to dreamland, and make that awful feeling go away.

Except it keeps coming back, that hoary ghost of intoxications past. So you drink some more to keep it at bay. You simply can't face up to the cesspool that alcohol has made of your life.

If you do ever manage to stop drinking and struggle through the depression, there is real happiness waiting at the end of that long, dark tunnel. It may take a year, maybe two, maybe more, but eventually you will come out into the light. You will have rescued your life from the great swindler and be on the road to a good life.

Get Her Drunk

If you want to have sex with a girl, get her drunk.

This bit of adolescent advice may be the first thing I learned about sex, even before I had any very concrete idea of what sex involved exactly. I didn't learn it from my father or from other guys, though, but rather from watching romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s on TV. Plying the innocent with drink figures into a lot of the movie plots of that era.

And this is reliable advice. Alcohol is very effective at breaking down a girl's natural resistance to the idea of having casual sex with whoever she happens to be with at the moment.

But choice of sexual partner has drastic consequences for your life. It is probably the most important decision you ever make. Choose badly and you are in for a boatload of unhappiness.

OK, you are saying, this isn't news. "Everybody knows that", as they say on the Geico commercials. But do we? I wonder. Colleges and universities are currently suffering attacks of angst over the bad publicity they are getting for alcohol-related rapes on campus. As I've written before, university administrators suffering severe budget shortfalls seem more concerned with promising campus fun than with what happens to students once they get there.

What prompts me to write now is a web site, http://before-i-do.org, sponsored by the University of Virginia, which argues that casual sex before marriage is associated with marital unhappiness. What it doesn't say, though, is that alcohol use is the demon behind both evils.

University of Virginia does have relatively strict rules, on paper, about conduct and drinking in dorms. As reported by students on sites like colleges.niche.com, though, enforcement is lax. It seems there is a certain hypocrisy involved, playing to parents' concerns with loud proclamations of strictness while winking at prospective students who want to go there to party. Why is it that even University of Virginia, which purports to be relatively strict, can't just take the step of prohibiting alcohol use by students on the grounds that it is contrary to everything the university stands for? Because they would lose half their enrollment. Like most of us these days, faculty and administrators are afraid for their jobs. When I was young, it was common for people to take principled stands on such things at universities. It seems though that, finally, we've all become slaves to our bank accounts, credit card balances and 401ks. No one can afford to stand up for doing the right thing.

Even at a conservative school like University of Virginia, calling out alcohol use is too dangerous to the budget. It's duplicitous for the university to argue against poor choices with no mention of what they know perfectly well to be the chemical enabler lurking in the shadows.