Dealing with my election anxiety, which thanks to Nate Silver is more or less limited to Republican fraud and voter suppression at this point, I was reviewing the history of voting rights in this country (quick summary here). It's been years since I reflected on a major extension of voting rights in my lifetime, ratified in 1971: the lowering of the minimum age from 21 to 18, in response to outcry about the unfairness of drafting young men of 18 to fight in Vietnam when they had no say in the government that drafted them.
Oddly, as some of us thought at the time, the legal drinking age in the US remained at 21. (In conservative Austria, where I studied for six months, college-age students could legally drink beer and wine, as students could and can throughout most of Europe.) Reagan nationalized this in 1984. The drinking age is still 21 in the US, of course -- widely flouted, and despite considerable evidence that a legal age so high (we share the world's highest with a few other outliers) may be counterproductive. Also in 1971, a lot of us liked to point out the absurdity of keeping pot illegal while the three-martini lunch was a common white-collar ritual. Even today, we still hear "alcohol and drugs," as if alcohol weren't a drug. And now I read that Washington State is on the verge of legalizing small amounts of marijuana, for persons 21 and over, when the legal age for tobacco is 18.
I don't get it. We can legally operate a motor vehicle at 16; marry, addict ourselves to tobacco, die for our country, and vote at 18; but we can't legally have a beer with our burger until we turn 21? If Washington does legalize small amounts of weed (and I hope they do, though I'm the rare Boomer who can honestly say she never inhaled), welcome to another silly rule on college campuses.