Should it be lowered Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Should it be lowered - Essay Example During an interview by CBS News, John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College said that the drinking law was an abysmal failure in eliminating underage drinking, it drove the habit underground behind the scenes, into more risky and unmanageable settings. These settings included basements, fraternity houses and locked dormitories where minors hid from the law and adults. The law created a dangerous culture of irresponsible and reckless habits, unsupervised binge and excess drinking. For example, minors gulp bottles of beer in seconds trying to perfect the art of getting drunk quickly before they are discovered by adults (Johnson & Alex, 46). The irresponsible drinking behaviour endangers the lives of minors because they cannot access emergency medical care during their drinking sprees as they hide themselves. They also fear reporting alcohol related medical emergencies since it is breaking the law. The drinking age should be lowered because the current law is unworkable, difficult to enforce and doesn’t stop minors from drinking. The enforcement of this law is routinely avoided and results in two or three arrests out of thousands of violations. The police aren’t in apposition to stop all cases of underage drinking, they can only contain it. The police department admitted that the law is ineffective. The police tried different techniques to curb drinking by minors but only few techniques succeeded (Toomey & Rosenfeld, 57). For example, they would find a party where minors were drinking and seal the house. They would write tickets to all the minors coming from the house and report them to their parents. All these efforts only pushed underage drinking underground instead of eliminating the habit. Pushing the drinking habit underground is endangers lives of the minors because encourages irresponsible drinking extremes and other antisocial behaviour such as drug abuse and crime. According to Ellis Henican (author of

A Correlation between Unequal Power Relations and the Way Language is Assignment

A Correlation between Unequal Power Relations and the Way Language is Used - Assignment Example The second of the three stages is all the more important because it has a lot to do with one’s spontaneity and judgment which ultimately become the major deciding factors in making the communication successful and effective. That is how the world draws the line of distinction between ‘great orators/authors’ and the mediocre and the bad. The choice of words, however, is a function of one’s instincts, emotions, and needs. The desire to dominate, to control, to feel powerful is a universal instinct that defies the boundaries of time and space. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that this basic instinct, or rather a base instinct, successfully manages to creep into all human transactions and manifests itself, more noticeably in the process of verbal communication. But, at the same time, the need to ‘get things done’ is also a matter of uppermost concern, and its importance cannot be understated. It is this factor that has the power to suppress the urge to dominate; it makes one willing to subordinate himself in a transaction. In any given instance, it is either the urge to dominate or the need to subordinate that finally stays, and it is decided by the prevailing equation of power in the given context. It boils down to the conclusion that â€Å"our words are never neutral; they carry the power that reflects the interests of those who speak or write.† (John Fiske, 1994; Fowler, et. al., 1979) An interesting quality of dominant discourse is that it usually represents and reinforces the interests of the elite section of the society. Professor Sue L. T. McGregor, in Critical Discourse Analysis – A Primer, says, â€Å"One of the central attributes of dominant discourse is its power to interpret conditions, issues, and events in favor of the elite.†