If you go out outside of the beltway....to an average town of 100,000 people, every Saturday night....they face this unique dilemma which has some relationship to the Ford/Kavanaugh business. You see, there will on any average Saturday night in this town....at least twenty-five private parties being held, with kids ranging from 13 to 17 years old, and alcohol being poured for enjoyable consumption. You can figure that at least two-hundred-and-fifty kids are at these parties.
Between eleven and one....at least five parents will be called by friends, neighbors, or the cops.....to be told that their 'Junior' or 'Vicky' has passed out in such-and-such city park, or been found in badly drunken state with no clothing on.
At least ten of these young women in attendance (some as young as 13 and 14)....will admit under pressure from a parental interrogation that they've 'done' at least a dozen guys over the past six months. Three or four young ladies might even go and admit thirty guys in the past year. A couple of the ladies might even admit 100-plus guys by age eighteen. They laugh when dad suggests this is pretty stupid behavior.
Some young lady will tell of the young guy she latched onto while half-drunk....who convinced her that he was the quarterback star of the state university team forty miles away, and that she gave him full attention for over an hour. Then weeks later, she will admit that she found out that he was a 17-year old guy from the next town over, and that she's pregnant from the fake-quarterback and drunken night of 'fun'.
Some kids (male and female) will admit by age sixteen that they have a drug and alcohol problem, and Mom has to convince Dad that the kid really does need to go to 'Sky-ranch-rehab-center' for four months of rehab, and their health insurance only pays 50-percent of the $18,000 cost.
Some parent will review their kid's Facebook chatter....to discover that the kid procured four kegs of beer for last weekend's private party at the city park, and that two kids got so drunk....that they required an ambulance trip. Now this parent sits there in continual worry that the cops may call, and some prosecution effort may occur, and their 'Becky' might be facing six months in some state youth facility.
So all of these parents sit and view this televised soap opera out of DC, and have a different view on things. In their mind, their daughter is some dimwit or junior-alcoholic with no capability to control herself, and they see a bunch of political folks giving fake-enthusiasm or fake-worry over how this one incident occurred. But in this town, like in thousands of other towns, this is a daily worry confronting parents. So this business of hype with Ford-angle? It's not working, and it's maybe even having the opposite effect.
These are the parents who are putting tracking devices on their kid's cars. These are the parents forcing the 15-year old kid to take a drug-test on Sunday morning. These are the parents who are calling the cops on their son's friends for the alcohol being handed out to underage kids. These are the parents sitting there with some young 16-year old girl who is pregnant but she can't be sure who the father is....because she passed out in the middle of some party. And these parents are all angry because the system isn't working.
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