PICTURE this: A group of friends got pretty drunk. One of them decided to drive while intoxicated.
All of them got in to the vehicle together to go to a store and buy beer.
They started drinking the beer as they pulled out of the parking lot of the store. The driver crashed his vehicle into a concrete wall.
His girlfriend was seriously injured in the crash and spent days on a ventilator to keep her alive.
She still has considerable other injuries sustained as a result of the crash and her family is in turmoil and financial straits because of off-island medical treatment and expenses.
Now, here’s the rub: Friends of the girl (a willing participant in the drinking spree) want to help and are planning a fundraiser that more than 125 people have already said they plan to attend – at a bar.
Luckily, for Jessica Opinion and her family, the consequences of getting in the passenger seat of a vehicle with a drunken driver did not play out with a more tragic ending. It could have.
Attitudes toward drinking on Guam facilitate tragedy. Despite the well-known lethal potential of driving after drinking, many regularly do so and consider each successful trip without a serious accident as subtle invalidation of all the warnings.
Having a fundraiser for the victim of an accident directly related to drunkenness is more than ironic. I understand wanting to raise funds to help the victim's family through financial hardships. But a fundraiser at a bar only serves to put more drivers with a few drinks in their bellies on Guam roads and endanger even more innocent victims who may not end up as lucky as Jessica and her two friends. That doesn't make sense.
Many think raising Guam’s drinking age is the solution to drunk driving. It is not. Jessica and her friends are well-above the legal drinking age. Besides, when was the last time you read or heard about a serious accident on Guam that involved drunk driving by underage drinkers?
The real problem with drinking and driving on our island is the attitude toward drinking that children on Guam are raised with.
A company right down the street from Variety had a company picnic recently. The company event held at a beach came with the standard fiesta fare; and a full complement of beer and alcohol. Present was a worker who invited his father and brought his young son, almost four years old, to the outing. He was not the only kid at the picnic.
After consuming more than his share of beer already, the worker’s lethargic father told the young child (his grandson) to go “get me a beer, boy!†from a cooler not too many feet from the older man. A second worker, who himself was drinking beer, protested, saying that it was inappropriate for him to order the child to bring him a beer. He told his colleague’s father he should get it himself.
Needless to say, the local man did not take kindly to the “off-islander†telling him that. An argument between the adults ensued, other workers got involved, including the company manager and the owner. There were more words and some pushing and shoving.
In the end, the old man got his beer from the kid. The manager and the owner took his side and the co-worker, who thought it was wrong to use a child as a beer-delivery mule, was fired. Today, the dismissed worker is still viewed by all the workers, most of their wives and families - with a few notable exceptions - and company management as being wrong for having mentioned how wrong it is to ask a child to get “your beer.â€
And I am sure, there are more than a few reading this that will instantly start to boil at the suggestion that a fundraiser at a bar for a victim, and willing participant in binge drinking and public drunkenness, is wrong, too.
I guess that’s just the way it is here on Guam. We like our tragedies easy.
