Dear Tigers, are you done with DUIs? Aren’t you sick and tired of bumming rides after drinking too much in Tigerland? Don’t you wish you could sip a cold one while flying down River Road?
Ireland holds the solution — legalized drunk driving.
Five of eight councillors on Ireland’s Kerry County Council support a piece of legislation that would allow drunk driving permits for those living in the countryside.
If Baton Rouge follows suit, fewer people will be legally liable for their deadly mistakes (great, right?) and we would have fewer people in prison.
We’d just have more funerals, totaled cars and knocked-over mailboxes on our hands.
LSU Police Department Spokesman Capt. Cory Lalonde said the state and parish have come far in the enforcement of drinking and driving laws, and a step like this would be a mistake.
A sponsor of the plan in Kerry County, Councillor Danny Healy-Rae, supports his idea by pointing out a lack of culture for local youth without the community of bars.
Wouldn’t we lose the college-town feel without Tigerland? Why not enhance its dingy pleasure?
What is Baton Rouge youth culture if not the sticky, 190-littered floors at Mike’s Daiquiris and Grill, the sweaty-Polo-and-cigarette scent of The House and infamous documented hookups at Reggie’s?
Dinner, a movie or visiting some museum are all passé. Who even eats dinner, except to act as a buffer between a classy night and throwing up out the window of your friend’s car?
With this measure, instead of relying on that friend to take you to some couch after a particularly bad night, you could take yourself home. If you drive 20 mph below the speed limit, maybe you’d only fatally fold your car around a lamp post three nights out of four.
Or drivers would never do that, because people would take better care of themselves if they knew it was their car they had to drive home at the end of the night. By this argument, the Irish measure could even increase responsible drinking.
By extension, there would be less of those crazy nights during which you are captured in embarrassing photos, resulting in fewer incriminating pictures tagged on Facebook that prevent you from getting hired anywhere with a decent reputation.
Actually, drunk driving would help graduates find better jobs more quickly — if they’re not already limbless or dead under their drunken comrades’ wheels.
According to Healy-Rae, the proposal would also help farmers out of depression so they aren’t “looking at the four walls, night in and night out.”
Lalonde countered that, saying those who require drinking to ward off depression may have bigger issues on hand.
Bigger issues like the soullessness of Herget Hall or the Pentagon, or freshmen lamenting their lack of transportation on a Friday night?
No matter what you say, the drunk bus is not always a viable option. It’s slow as hell and fills up fast.
If we just pay $20 for a drunk driving permit with the rest of our University fees, that would take care of it all.
That money up front would definitely be worth the amount of damage idiots would do to Daddy’s car over the course of our first semester.
So what are you waiting for, Baton Rouge? Legalize a little bit of drunk driving. It would help your reputation in the long run — and kill off the flagship University’s entire student body.
