A message from the Rector

By Richard Hall | Posted: Thursday March 17, 2022

There should be a few 20 'somethings' waking up with a hangover this morning after St Patrick's Day, and a few 18 'somethings' going into this long weekend planning on getting one.

Alcohol and our attitudes towards it are not new, but I want to say I have found both this mornings ODT's pictorial, and last nights One News live cross to Dundas Street; poor. Dress it up in green, or however you like, it glorifies the culture that says getting wasted is still very very cool.

Now hand up, not a perfect specimen talking here, but I also have a day job, one where I am constantly worried and dealing with the consequences of poor choices in young men. And to be frank, we need some help.

We need some personal honesty. We need to share that honesty as adults, with our boys. Time for you to 'fess up'.

I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's 'Talking to Strangers', I enjoy his writing. In the book he covers some very heavy hitting topics. Particularly striking is his analysis of sexual assaults by young men on young women in American Colleges. In this topic alcohol is obviously central in the issue, particularly drinking until students blackout.

In his book (and I am wildly paraphrasing here) he talks about myopia, a theory from Claude Steele and Robert Josephs; meaning that 'alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision' (pg207), basically meaning, when you are drunk, you are going to make bad decisions, ones that will follow you well and truly after your hangover passes.

He goes on to say that drunkenness puts you at the 'mercy of your environment'; if you are an anxious person in a happy place, you won't feel so anxious, but if you are drinking alone, even at a party, it will make an already anxious person, more so. Alcohol 'clouds out everything except the most immediate experiences', you deal in the here and now, not the what if. That's my point.

We all know people who are good and bad drunks. Alcohol does not change them, there are other underlying things that alcohol brings out, but they were there before. And your son will either be a good or bad drunk, and he is certainly very vulnerable to being at the mercy of his environment. He gets his eyebrows shaved and we all laugh, but are we missing a sign?

So, I ask that over the long weekend, when hopefully you are enjoying a glass of wine or whatever, you take the time to have a conversation. Tell a story or two (even ones that may not be that flattering), because boys like that, and then you add in some wisdom, particularly about being conscious of the environment you are in. 

Good luck.