When I was in 9th grade, at the urging of my father, a couple of my friends and I joined the Young Democrats Club. We didn’t really know much about politics except that democrats were liberal and Mondale and Ferraro, who were running for President and Vice President, were democrats. The big event for the club was a Young Democrats convention held at the Ramada Inn in Columbia, Maryland.
Columbia is about 3 hours from my home so my friends and I decided that it would be an excellent chance to get away from our parents. The chaperones were a couple of college kids who didn’t even know our names. We left on a Friday afternoon and there was a local T.V. station there asking us what we expected to learn. We told them that we hoped to return more knowledgable about our nation’s form of government.
When we got there Friday evening my friends and I had a room just for us.
At the first meeting we went to that night there was alcohol being served. Most of the people there were in college and gung-ho politicos. We were easily the youngest ones there. None of us had never really ever had alcohol before except
for the sips our parents had given us. All we knew was that wherever there was a
party, there was some form of alcohol, so there had to be something fun to drink.
We tried to buy it first, but the bartender ID’s us. So being the devilish teenagers we were, we stole unopened bottles of beer off tables where people talking. To add to our beer we bought a pack of cigarettes (sold out of vending machines), another experiment for us.
When we got back to the room we locked the door and opened the beer. I don’t know if any of you remember tasting beer for the first time, but to us it was horrible. We could not drink more than a sip at a time and had to swish it around in our mouths before we could swallow it. Each of us might have drunk about one beer and by then we figured we were drunk.
Next we opened the cigarettes. We all knew they were bad for us but you know that feeling inside of you that makes you do it anyway. I just don’t know what cigarettes do to make you feel good. But something wasn’t right since we were all coughing our lungs out. By this time I was feeling pretty crazy so I decided to start smoking rolled-up paper, thinking it would be something like a joint since it was rolled. Before I knew it I was breathing in little burnt pieces of paper which made me feel quite sick.
All this time we were smoking, the windows and door were closed so you can imagine what happened next. That fire alarm scared us so bad that we all ran
down the hall and hid around the corner. When the initial shock had worn off, we
realized our only chance for safety lay in stopping the alarm. So we ran back, but
we couldn’t get the alarm to stop since we couldn’t reach it. So we threw stuff at
it until someone’s shoe finally broke it. We then hid the beer bottles in an ice
chest in the hall and flushed down the toilet all the cigarettes and paper we had
burnt. Fortunatly, no one came to check the room and we breathed a sigh of relief.
About an hour later I went to the bathroom and stepped into an inch of toilet
water. The john had gotten stopped up when we had tried to flush all the evidence.
We used all our towels and toilet paper cleaning that up and the entire bathroom
stunk of sewage.
Somehow we survived the rest of the weekend without getting into any trouble. I will never forget that night, and to this day I still can’t stand smoking and beer still tastes terrible.
I can still remember the reporter’s question as we got out of the van back at home, “Can any of you tell me what you learned at the Convention?” We just smiled and walked away.
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed 