Seeing Yourself in Social and Historical Context Essays

Seeing Yourself in Social and Historical Context Essays Seeing Yourself in Social and Historical Context Essay Seeing Yourself in Social and Historical Context Essay Essay Topic: Everything I Never Told You Recently, I realized that alcohol and the partying lifestyle had become negative influences on my life. The negative influence was subtle most of the time, but there were occasional moments when the effects of drinking played a highly visible role in my personal life and relationships. I decided that I might like to decrease, if not eliminate, my consumption of alcoholic beverages and this decision prompted further difficulties and challenges in my life, particularly in regard to my friends and peers, and those with whom I had regularly socialized. Though I realize I am not an alcoholic; I can get by just fine without drinking, the impact of my decision not to drink as much has exerted a dramatic influence on my daily life. In many ways, I think my personal experience mirrors those of many, many people, especially younger people who are embracing personal freedom and individual decision-making, often for the first time in their lives. Any young person looking to the media, or to the real-life examples of their elders will see that consumption of alcoholic beverages is utilized as a panacea for everything from stress to boredom. People are portrayed in commercials as happy-go-lucky, and even glamorous when they are drinking; I can’t even hope to count how many times in a movie or television show or novel or commercial, people are seen drinking alcohol to give themselves â€Å"courage† or to meet an unpleasant event or chore. Also, when you are young, you are supposed to be having â€Å"fun;† many older people have told that to myself and my friends, wistfully, as though they wished they were young again. The expectation to be having the â€Å"best time of your lives† is reinforced also through much of the media we see and hear. Almost every style of popular music from rock to rap to country glamorizes drinking and makes it seem like it is the â€Å"thing to do.† Drinking seems to have a social reputation for being everything it isn’t. That is: although peers, the media, elders, and even the law seem to advocate drinking, to make it seem like a privilege and a mark of adulthood, I found through personal experience that the real results of drinking were much less romantic. Instead of great social camaraderie and glamor, I just wound up not remembering a lot of things I said and did with my friends, and instead of feeling like I was mature and responsible, I wound up feeling completely out of control and incapable of taking care of my responsibilities. Nowhere in the media and cultural glamorizations of alcohol do we get to see the â€Å"after result† which is being sick from a hangover and not remembering anything you said or did. It seems obvious that most people crave and desire a release from their everyday lives. Maybe they are frustrated with their careers or their relationships or they are just frustrated with life in general. But instead of delving into the cause and effect of stress or boredom or unhappiness, society seems to forward drinking as the great escape. There are bars on every corner, liquor stores, ads for beer, wine, and hard liquor on television. It’s obvious that we all crave a break from the ordinary and society offers very little in the way of inexpensive entertainment for the masses. There is television, movies, music and drinking: if you look closely you will see that there are cultural reinforcement and ties between all of these recreational pastimes. In a capitalist society, marketing no-doubt plays a very large role in fostering the myths about drinking. The big corporations that sell alcoholic products rake in billions of dollars and this allows them to permeate the social media with selected images that increase the propagation of   myths about drinking and never represent the scientifically established dangers to body, mind, and emotional responses that occur when individuals turn to alcohol for release. When I cam across an article, â€Å"WHATS YOUR DAUGHTER DRINKING TONIGHT? One Middleclass Girls Haunting Account of How the Binge-Drinking Culture That Afflicts Countless Teenagers Nearly Cost Her Life, I realized that the dangerous fallout from drinking could be far worse than nagging hangovers; I could have lost my life. In the article, a girl explains how she began drinking for just the same reasons I have noted above: boredom, a sense of glamor and excitement, peer pressure, and the desire to be mature and self-determined. However, the article goes on to describe how the girl nearly lost her life, and how drinking had slowly robbed her of her self-esteem, her ability to distinguish right from wrong, and her relationship with her parents. Reading the article, the first impact that ht me was how similar the girl’s story seemed to be with my own experience. However, i had never really imagined that my drinking could lead to such a devastating, near-death event such as the one described in the article. Knowing that my very life is at stake, now, I find it very hard to imagine that I will veer abuse alcohol, or that I would ever condone the abuse of alcohol as a glamorous or socially expected norm. Like the girl in the article, i found that my reluctance to drink alcohol influenced my relationship with certain people I had once been friendly with; those who still drank regularly seemed to seek to avoid my company. This fact would have troubled me more deeply were it not for the account in the article which demonstrate a very similar result. In the article, the girl wrote: â€Å"Most importantly, Ive become stronger. I want to find friends who will like me whether or not I drink. There is so much pressure nowadays to keep up with each   other, like some sort of competition to see who can get the most drunk. It makes me sad to think I never had the guts to refuse. I havent heard from a lot of my so-called friends. My drinking buddies have largely disappeared† (WHATS YOUR DAUGHTER DRINKING 26), which is exactly how I feel although my experience was far less dramatic and far less extensive than those described in the article. The biggest jolt I received from reading the article was the girl’s description of her near-fatal accident: The only thing I can remember is we were drinking neat vodka. Four weeks later, I woke up in hospital after being in a coma on a life support machine. The room was clinically white and totally unfamiliar. Youre in hospital, said my mum, who was sitting red- eyed at my side. Standing at the edge of the bed were two policemen waiting to speak to me. Id been found at the bottom of the car park, after falling 20ft from the top floor, and was lucky to be alive. Id split my skull, broken my neck and dislocated my shoulder. Almost immediately Id fallen into a coma, during which Id had a blood clot on my brain. The swelling was so bad I had to be put on a life- support machine and have part of my skull removed to help reduce the pressure. (WHATS YOUR DAUGHTER DRINKING 26) Though I’d personably never experienced this intense of a negative impact from drinking, the shock that I could have experienced it was quite an influence on me. I had been someone who drank very little, but I did drink, caving into the same social and peer pressures that were described in the article. I wondered how many of my friends and drinking companions were bound to meet such a terrible fate due to their recklessness. More importantly, this recklessness was socially acceptable behavior – drinking being glamorized from every quarter of the media-driven world. The evidence was clear to me from personal experience and from studying the article and other sources where the truths about alcohol consumption were made available. The facts were strikingly opposed to the social myth. Rather than promoting glamor, fun, and social revery, alcohol was responsible for (or at least involved in) some of the most atrocious social syndromes in our world: suicide, crime, early pregnancy, unemployment, divorce, chronic health problems and emotional instability. All of these aspects are apparent in the selected article and it seemed the girls’ story was a microcosm of the ills that accompany alcohol abuse. Making the decision not to abuse alcohol seemed fairly easy for me, although trying to make my friend understand this decision or even encouraging them to examine the perils of alcohol abuse for themselves before experiencing them directly proved to be much more difficult. Because the consumption of alcohol is so deeply ingrained into our social fabric- and this influence extends back through time in history as well- I found that one person’s experiences, whether dramatic and nearly fatal as the girl in the article’s, or more mundane, such as my own, seemed to exert little or no influence over those who were determined and convinced that drinking was fabulous fun and glamorous. This is a paradox because the devastating impacts of alcohol abuse are deeply personal in nature: impacting an individual’s health, relationships, personal responsibilities, and emotional well-being, but the media-driven image of alcohol is abstracted into the universal, meaning: the purveyors of alcohol labor to create and image for alcohol-consumption that presents a picture of social inclusiveness, normalcy, and even tradition. People raise toasts at special, memorable occasions; they commemorate special years and epochs in with wines and brandy and even the most scared and hallowed holidays, such as Christmas and New Year’s Eve involve the socially instituted drinking of alcohol.Now that I have stopped to examine the influence of drinking on my personal life I find it very difficult to regard others’ drinking as harmless or simply a recreation. I realize that, rather than considering the possible negative effects of drinking, most people who abuse alcohol are searching for the â€Å"myth† of drinking which is fostered from social institutions and corporations and media outlets. Those who abuse alcohol find themselves so intellectually, emotionally, and socially immersed in their abuse that they are unable to consider the possible bad effects of their behavior. When someone, such as myself, tries to point out these negatives, the counter-argument is so heavily backed up by other people and established social behaviors, that the person pointing out the dangers can be easily ridiculed and dismissed. This means that my decision not to abuse alcohol will be an ongoing process. No doubt, I will be confronted with pressure to drink and pressure to abuse alcohol for the remainder of my life. It s a friendly gesture to offer someone a drink and it is socially acceptable to accept this offer, whereas it can be socially off-putting to refuse, as though you are refusing someone’s friendship. Nonetheless, my personal well-being, health and emotional development are as important to me as social acceptance.   There is a socially accepted â€Å"picture† or image of the drinker: a fun-loving, friendly, free-spirted person, but there is also this picture, from the article: A few days later, I asked for a mirror. Holding it up to my face, I shrank back in horror. Doctors had shaved all the hair off the top of my head, leaving my long locks trailing at the back like one of those evil-looking wigs from a joke shop. There was a huge scar on my head where theyd removed part of my skull and my head was lopsided where it was missing. (WHATS YOUR DAUGHTER DRINKING 26) For me, there is no confusion over what it means to abuse alcohol, and no uncertainty as to whether or not I will do so in the future. Some people drink in an attempt to find courage; others Seeing Yourself in Social and Historical Context   like me have found courage by not drinking and that includes the courage to face those who may ridicule or ostracize somebody because they have made an informed decision to not abuse alcohol. I can only hope that my own experiences while much more mundane than those recounted in the article may someday help inform another about the perils, often lethal, which accompany alcohol abuse.   If so, I will have succeeded in understanding how one’s subjective experience connects to the social whole and the historical confluences of society– in this case helping to exert a positive influence in an area where so many negatives are socially accepeted.