LadyEllen
Posts: 10931
Joined: 6/30/2006
From: Stourport-England
Status: offline
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I'm really not sure what its like in small town America when it comes to the "night time economy", but what Aneirin described here is what happens throughout small town UK every night, only getting worse at weekends. These are small towns - 50,000 population and up - the cities are even worse.
Hordes of young people, 17-30, swamp the town centres from about 9-10pm, having spent since 6pm at the latest getting drunk on cheap supermarket booze. In the town centres they go from bar to bar - not traditional English pubs like you might imagine if youre reading this in the US, but darkened nightclubs, crowded to standing room only where the music is so loud you cant hear the person next to you and drinks promotions prevail.
The entire objective of the hordes is to get as much alcohol into their system as possible and preferably to have sex with a stranger and/or to beat the crap out of someone or other for some reason, or better, for no reason other than to express the disinhibition wrought by intoxication. And this objective is shared and fulfilled by the female component of the horde to the same and occasionally greater extent. A good night out consists of enough alcohol to fell a bull elephant and a spend of around £100-00; about half a week's pay for most of the horde. How it counts as a good time is an insoluble puzzle to anyone over the age of about 30.
Anyway, after leaving the nightclub - which can be anytime until about 3am, those who have the money and are not too ill will take a taxi (after fighting it out with others for the right) and the remainder of the horde will make their ways home, screaming, shouting and fighting in residential streets, throwing up, pissing through letterboxes and generally causing mayhem. The police, so evident and numerous in the town centre, are absent from the residential areas through which they walk.
We have a real problem in the UK with alcohol these days. Whereas it used to be old men who suffered liver failure and alcoholic dementia, we now have people in their early 20s under treatment for such conditions and dying of them and especially young women. And the casualty count when we include the number and extent of personal injuries - incurred through extreme intoxication or inflicted by others under such intoxication, rises enormously. Every night, and especially at weekends the A&E departments are overwhelmed by such incidents, where it might surprise to hear the drunken behaviour of the injured often continues and results in ambulance personnel, doctors and nurses being attacked by those whom they are attempting to treat.
What is driving all this? Many things - not the least of which is the 24hr drinking introduced by the government a few years ago and the relaxation of licensing regulations which now make it extremely difficult to deny licences to sell alcohol, so leading to a plethora of nightclubs in often close proximity in town centres, and extremely difficult to deprive a licensee of his licence. Factor in a drinks industry which represents enormous profits for the manufacturers who are now able to sell at a lower price because of the larger market and the recipe is almost complete, although as it stands to this point - should we throw in the heavy discounting of booze by the supermarkets, we have the explanation for the decline of the traditional pub.
The remaining ingredient has its origin in the housing market - sounds odd I know. In times past a young person or couple would spend a few years at most living with their parents as adults, saving the money to set up home. Nowadays that goal is financially out of reach for many unless they rent, (saving for a deposit on an apartment even would take a decade) - and no one wants to rent as it is socially less acceptable and not good for your credit score. So young adults remain at home with parents for much longer - paying either nothing or very little for their bed and board, leaving them the remainder of their wages to go out, where they find that in order to be "cool" they have to drink the most of all their friends, (although this is a common factor in all age ranges) and find a market place adapted to that end with cheap drinks and an environment that dulls the senses to just how drunk they have become.
I believe however that the good times will come to an end shortly. Society cannot afford the clean up and the drinks industry wont pay for it, but more than that its simply unacceptable for the majority to be driven out of town at night and to live in fear of the violence and vandalism that finds its way into residential areas in the middle of the night.
E
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In a test against the leading brand, 9 out of 10 participants couldnt tell the difference. Dumbasses.
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RE: What a shitt society we live in - 
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