Convenient child care has a price too.

I understood that with campaign finance reform there would be special interest groups lining up to support their candidates even without being directly associated with that candidate. What I did not expect is that these special interest groups would get to do all of the mudslinging for their chosen candidate. Now we have a commercial on the air that blasts Pete Coors for wanting to lower the drinking age and talks up the other candidate for the Colorado Senate seat (I won't mention his name here because he would want me to). The commercial states that by lowering the drinking age that Coors would be endangering our children. Come on people! If you would spend enough time raising your kid to be a responsible citizen, Coors raising the drinking age is not going to present a problem to you or your kid. Instead the Conservative Voters of Colorado would prefer to hide behind the government on the drinking age the same way they like to have the government out there telling kids that drugs are illegal because they are illegal. That's very convenient for the Conservatives, but since when did our government become the moral equivalent of 7-11? Remember that convenience comes at a price. 7-11 is on the corner, waiting for your urgent business at midnight, but that Twinkie you so desperately need (we won’t go into why you need it) is going to cost you significantly more than it would in the grocery store that closed at 8pm. The same thing goes for the moral convenience of letting the government help you avoid tough issues with your child. Instead of talking at great lengths with your child about what drugs are and what drugs are not (yes, alcohol is also a drug) so they can make well informed decisions, you get to conveniently tell your youngster that you just can't do something because that would be ILLEGAL. The cost may eventually make it back to you but the person that will really pay for your convenient decision will be your child. They will not have the benefit of growing up with wine at the dinner table and a couple of beers at the family gathering. They will not get to hear about harmless sleep overs where someone had too much to drink and passed out in the back yard because not only was no one allowed to leave because it was a parent sanctioned sleep over but because they were 13, so they couldn't even drive. If you want your child to learn how to be responsible you have to teach it to them at home just like you do with every other moral decision you expect them to make. You should send you children to school to learn math and writing, and science, and logic. Not to be taught morality! That needs to come from the home. I know that it is tough and you would rather have someone else burdened with this heavy responsibility, but whose child is this? The answer is not that the child belongs to society or the government, the child is yours. So when your child self-destructs at 21 when they are finally allowed legally drink I do not want you to be allowed to go on living with a clean conscience because you have bought the idea that the government or society failed your child, YOU DID. That is the final price you will pay for the buying a bill of goods from a moral 7-11.