Kyle Giachelli was a sophomore at Mississippi State until early Saturday, Oct. 1, when he lost his life in a car accident that may have been alcohol-related. An MSU freshman has been charged with DUI in the accident, and a grand jury will decide in January if further charges will be made against her.
Is this going to be the tragedy that sobers up a drunken community?
Starkville is obsessed with alcohol. And I don’t presume to know where we rank in relation to other college towns and their obsession with drinking, but we’ve got it pretty bad.
Since I’ve been going to school here there has only been a couple of times that the student body has demonstrated real interest over local government. The first time was when the hours of alcohol service on the weekend were pushed back from midnight to 1 a.m. And the other was when the city recently began to allow the sale of cold beer. Now, in addition to that, we’re allowed to drink hard liquor on campus.
Well, you’ve got to give the people what they want, right? And if we, the dollar-spending, sales tax-paying public want alcohol, then that’s what we’ll have, in large amounts.
To be fair, the city probably isn’t too wild about loosening all the alcohol restrictions, but those revenues are just too much to ignore, aren’t they?
So it’s no surprise that so many people get so drunk every weekend. The city is bending over backward to sell us alcohol. And we happily oblige.
And with that many people getting wasted each weekend, a certain percentage are bound to try to drive home that way.
We don’t know exactly what role alcohol played in Kyle’s death. Perhaps it was just an accident that could have happened even if the driver had not been drinking.
But imagine being the driver who hits a pedestrian. Put yourself in those shoes for a minute.
In the blink of an eye your entire life changes horribly.
Imagine the horror you would feel if you were driving in your car and you hit someone. Imagine seeing that person a split second too late and knowing that you were about to hit them, and there was nothing you could do.
And, as if it’s not bad enough that you have to live with the guilt, what if you were drunk at the time?
If you hurt someone while you’re driving drunk, you’ll instantly and frantically want to take it back. Every tiny fiber of you will scream and cry that there must be some way to undo what’s just been done. But you’ll already know that there isn’t. You’ll be painfully aware that it’s an ugly permanent reality.
Is this going to make people sit down for a few hours wherever they are to let the alcohol wear off before they get behind the wheel? Is this going to make people decide to set a limit for themselves when they drink? Is this going to prompt a few individuals to be leaders and stay sober to watch over their friends while they drink?
I doubt it.