Written by Joe Krzyston
Last weekend, two students were apprehended by Campus Safety. Their offence? Drinking underage anywhere other than a weird, slyly school sanctioned basement.
Said one of the students, “It was a cool, breezy Friday evening, and my buddy and I figured it would be a great night to split a six-pack on the bleachers overlooking the soccer field. We wanted to take a break from the nauseatingly toxic atmosphere on weekends on campus- the constant heavy drinking, the yelling, the vomiting in bathrooms. Naturally, drinking in moderation with a good friend seemed like a great way to do this, according both to widely held popular sentiment and our own previous experience. We were both underage, true, but given the flagrancy with which this regulation is so frequently broken on and off campus, we thought the precedent of acceptability had already been set.”
“Not so,” said the arresting officer. “See, my job is to keep the student body safe, and when I came across these two students, drinking moderately, neither of them visibly intoxicated, I immediately saw a serious threat to both their wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. There they were, engaged in conversation, not a phone out among them. What if they’d gotten three beers deep and discussed something dangerous?”
At the root of the offence, however, was not that the students were drinking underage, but that the students were drinking underage outside of a de-facto safe zone, namely a weird, dirty basement. “We acknowledge that students are likely to drink underage,” said a representative of the school, “which is why we turn a blind eye so long as students are willing to engage in this behavior strictly in the confines of the cinder-block basement of a Fraternity house. The Fraternity, out of respect for the laws of this great nation and state, is forced to go through a set of arbitrary rituals to claim some degree of deniability, and this keeps everybody dependably safe. These loud, frantic, hypersexualized spaces are great venues for students to come together with their peers and engage in the sort of enlightened discourse we keep claiming to facilitate as a college.”
As far as the fates of the students involved go, they are both set to attend hearings with Residence Life, a department widely respected as a steadfast arbiter of truth, justice and reason. They’re both held in high regard by the campus community, so their penalties are expected to be light. One, charged with just possession of alcohol, is expected to be made to complete a gauntlet of worthless classes and profess, in writing, his sincere regret at having committed no perceptible moral transgression. The other, who was found with marijuana, is expected to be tarred and feathered by the concerned citizens of Salem, VA. Both have been stripped of their dignity for the duration of the process.