[charrisku]

I agree wholeheartedly on the public drinking aspect. I lived in Virginia for 30 years and if you are walking around on the street with a beer, you're essentially asking to spend 4 hours in the "drunk tank" for public intoxication. This will be followed by offering some welfare ($) to the local legal profession to get the charge dismissed or pled down so you won't have a criminal conviction for your future employers to ask you about. There are similar laws in many other states and it definitely puts the kibosh on any potential block party you may wish to have. Since moving to Europe I find it pretty awesome to be able to enjoy a beer while I stroll and not worry about being run in so I can fund some lawyer's BMW lease.

[VLM]

The article tip toed around the hatred "everyone who doesn't party" (which the article admits is the VAST majority of the population) has against the tiny minority who party. Mixing hyper militarized cops with high school drinking parties isn't much of a win, so the 5% or so of the party population get kicked out of the middle class pool either financially or via criminal charges before they get into their later 20s where journalists ponder why that social group mysteriously disappeared. Mix the poverty of permanent declines in economic standard of living with increasing fines to be "tough on crime" and mandatory minimums and the risk just isn't worth it both for the people who hold the party and the drunk drivers who attend, and people with risk taking disabilities are destroyed before the late 20s that the journalist is writing about.

Another cultural curiosity is I'm old enough to have been born into sports nerd dominated culture, but the times they are a changin' and the journalist is apparently completely divorced from sports nerd culture, doesn't know anyone who brings over a couple beers to watch the game with a dozen or so guys, or tailgates. The rise of liability lawsuits and anti-drinking culture might be behind a drop in tailgating. I've heard some stadiums ban tailgating entirely! Anyway its interesting that sports nerd culture has declined so incredibly far that the author doesn't even consider mentioning it. For folks too young to have ever experienced it, a ball game on TV used to be a perfectly good excuse for multi-hour long house parties even for people who aren't interested in sports, it wasn't strictly a jock thing; I guess the canonical stereotypical example would be the superbowl party where most of the party goers don't care much about the game but its a convenient holiday between new years and spring break or memorial day (valentines day doesn't count, its for couples not house parties)

[joesmo]

That hatred is very strong indeed. It seems to be built into a lot of people, a sort of envy of others that are "having fun" (even if they're not, like in the case of addicts/alcoholics) and a desire that they should be punished, jailed, or even killed. I'm not sure if this comes from the Puritanical background here in the US or just from people's idiocy, of which there is no shortage of, but it is disgusting, cruel, and illogical. Not to mention economically and socially crippling.