One recent Saturday morning, on my car radio, I heard the great old Hank Williams Sr. tune, “Tear in My Beer.” Hank Williams Jr. sang along on the re-make of the song: “I’ve got a tear in my beer cause I’m cryin’ for you dear. You are on my lonely mind.”
What a great song! Terrific harmonies, catchy tune, clever lyrics. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all weekend.
Unfortunately, the song – what might be called nowadays, a novelty song – was way too true to be truly funny. Hank Williams Sr. drank many, many beers, tears or no tears, in his short life. He died on the back seat of his car on his way to a concert in 1953.
His son Hank was not even four years old when “Daddy”, as he still always refers to him, left this world. Following the family tradition, Hank Jr. went on to whoop it up pretty good too, till he finally straightened out and avoided his father’s fate.
Much has been written about the way our culture condones, even glorifies, the use of alcohol. And people do seem more educated about its downside these days.
But in the scheme of things, booze doesn’t warrant much serious discussion as one of society’s ills. Maybe there are just too many other things to worry about these days.
Such as the scourge of a drug commonly called meth. Then there are date-rape drugs. Young people are sniffing glue and gasoline. And one of the craziest fads of all: They are purposely choking each other – and sometimes even doing it on their own, fatally it has turned out in a few cases – in order to enjoy the “high” that comes from depriving the brain of oxygen for a brief while.
Yes, underage kids drinking beer around a campfire doesn’t seem quite so bad, I suppose, compared to some of the alternatives.
But statistics don’t lie and while a drug such as meth probably deserves the high profile it’s been given by the task force established to fight it in my home county in Canada, it is alcohol abuse that will cause the greatest number of tragedies in our midst in the foreseeable future: fires, drownings, traffic accidents, suicides, murders, family breakdowns and violence and child abuse.
It can be easily and surely predicted that this summer, when the kids get out on the roads of the countryside that surrounds my small city, several of them who are at this moment alive and happy and laughing with their friends and families, will not be here by fall.
A popular gym and history teacher I had in my high school days in the town of Mitchell, remarked wistfully towards the end of his career that the equivalent of one whole class of students he had taught had died in car accidents over the years. Yes, not all of them would have been caused by booze, but a good number were. I remember some of those accidents. I knew some of those kids.
Why don’t we have a task force on youth and liquor and the broken lives in our midst being caused by the combination of the two? Is it because so many of our homes have alcohol in our beer coolers, our wine racks, our liquor cabinets?
Not many of us have any meth lying around, and if we did it is doubtful we’d build a nice panelled room with bar and stools in our basement where we could serve it.
And how many of us sit around the pubs, having serious discussions about today’s terrible drug problems, when one of the most dangerous of all is sitting on the table before us?
There is a clever expression that alcoholism doesn’t come in bottles; it comes in people. Unfortunately, several people in our midst today will be lying in the ground before summer’s end. And some of them won’t have even touched a drop but still will be killed by alcohol – and the drunk who veered over the line, who set the house on fire or threw the fatal punch.
We should study ways of combating meth, by all means. But let’s not forget the devil we know – only too well.
©2007 Jim Hagarty
