hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Girt By Sea - And Pissed By Lunch Time
"Of the 600-odd 24-hour drinking licences across Australia, more than 60 per cent of them can be found in this state. More importantly, though, are our soaring alcohol-related crime figures and social costs. In some parts of the city and along the Central Coast, Sunday morning pedestrians require hopscotch skills to negotiate the patties of dried vomit.The physical toll is more extreme, with rising hospital admissions, increased incidents of glassings and a culture which has barely changed in more than half a century.
Yet the push to bring some form of restraint to our drinking laws is not a new form of wowserism, despite the claims of some critics."
::View Article::
Intelligent regulation, i.e. not the sort that simply creates a dangerous atmosphere of collective annoyance among hordes drunks suddenly locked out of drinking venues at 2 or 3am, might obviously do some good.
But Australians have always, how do you say, been partial to a drink or two. "Girt by sea and pissed by lunchtime", as the saying goes. IN the past we've gone through waves of regulation and de-regulation in response to scenes of binge drinking and intoxication in bars and on the street, as the body of the article sighted above reveals.
It's only now that we're using those 2 or 3 (or 15+) drinks as an excuse to vent our anger, frustration and ego's onto our fellow man. This might reflect either a society less and less happy with itself and its emerging collective goals (materialism, massification, growth, multi-'culturalism'/social division) or a culture of "me, me" individualism of the Corey Worthington sort, or both.
These notions like 'Individualism' and 'social goals' are not tangible. They are not really discussed as social determinants because they cannot be measured and 'distributed' more or less evenly, like wealth, liquor licences, health-care or even aspects of education. But they are notions that must come into play in society because any society always involves some sort of relationship (often a trade-off) between individual ego and the good of the whole/collective, and also some sort of collective orientation or direction, even if it's an unspoken one.
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