In the end it all boils down to a simple thing, we all make the choice. We choose whether to drink or not to drink. If we choose to drink, make another choice. We choose how much to drink and so on. So life has always been about choice, for everyone. Being a teenager is hard enough with school and family and everything else. We also have to deal with the fact that there are many things out there that can either harm us or help us or neither, depending on what it is. Alcohol consumption is such a complicated subject, after all everyone has an opinion about it. Nevertheless everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Some people say that alcohol is wrong no in-betweens, its plain wrong, and nobody should do it because it causes nothing but trouble. Other people say that it isn t the fact that there is alcohol but the fact that people abuse it and misuse it. That it is every person s responsibility to know and do what he or she thinks they should. Some other people think that there is nothing wrong with it and that everything is fine the way it is. Teenagers have to understand, that whatever they do will have consequences, they could be good or they could be bad but nonetheless consequences. These consequences haunt each person for the rest of their lives. Reminding them of what they have done. A lot of teenagers learned this the hard way, by seeing someone dying or actually killing somebody. It sounds very far away but it really isn t because one sip of tequila or beer or any alcoholic beverage could numb your senses long enough for a tragedy to happen. Most teenagers just want to have fun they know what they are doing and they know when to stop, but others don t even know what they do or when they do it, these are the ones to be afraid of. Teenagers have grown up seeing everyone with a can of beer so it s as normal as Coke and Pepsi for most, but they have to comprehend that not everything is what it seems. What is the fun of going to a party and then you can t remember anything the next day only the obvious, that you got so drunk that you can t remember anything. Teenagers should learn that there are limits and that those limits don t mean that you become a less fun person. These limits mean that you are smart enough to figure out that being drunk isn t fun, that not being able to talk or walk is fun, that wondering what you did last night isn t fun, and that making a fool out of yourself is definitively not fun. Everyone has to grow up and realize that life is what you make of it, and if you want to spend it wondering what you did or where you where then that s okay, but that in the end each person chooses. Some people didn t get the chance to make the choice, they are dead know, killed by drunk drivers, or were driving drunk, or were just sitting in the passenger seat. Others have to live with the choice they made. Its illogical once knowing everything that most teenagers know about all those accidents and all those dead people younger than some, a little older than others but still in the same age group. They still don t open their eyes. For some people its too late, the alcoholics who started drinking when they were ten or so, they have no strength to stop, they are doomed to live with the choice they made and even if we all tried to help, its all up to them.
Teenagers start drinking at an early age, because our society has let us. Then we continue to do it because somehow they let us. As teenagers grow up, even if they started in the same place, they end up in different paths, in those paths they walk alone. Some travel the safe road, the one where they choose not to drink. Some travel the moderate road in which they choose to drink but know until what extent to do it. Others choose the dangerous road where they choose to live a life full of blackouts caused by too much alcohol in their blood stream, a life full of dangerous turns that somehow always end in tragedy. In the end no matter which road we take as an individual, there will always be other people who have chosen the dangerous path, which inevitably makes our path dangerous too. We have to ensure that the factors that lead to drinking be decreased. We have to make sure that the situations that lead a teenager into alcohol be made better. This starts with a choice: to let die, or help live. All there is to do is to try to inform the youth of today so that they will inform the youth of tomorrow, and hopefully that way we can all be much safer than before.
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