As certain as death and beer

By Greta Gao

Scott Krueger is dead. I wonder how many people at Yale actually know who he was or what his death represents.

For the past three weeks, we have treated the death of the 18 year-old freshman in Cambridge as something far removed, unimportant, and irrelevant to our New Haven lives. His death convulsed the MIT community, forcing administrators and students to reconsider and debate the school's alcohol policies, and generated letter after letter defending the ban on alcohol or the benefit of fraternity systems. Yet Krueger's death had hardly any impact on our psychology. There were no elaborate letters about the harms of underage drinking sent to the Herald, no impassioned debate on the floor of YPU, and no dinner conversations (in which I participated, at least) that ever mentioned his name. We act as if the world of Krueger, a few hundred miles from us, does not intersect our own.

The facts are sad enough. A bright young man with a promising future at an elite institution was found unconscious in the basement of his residential house, lying in the midst of empty alcohol bottles and possessing a blood alcohol level more than five times that of legal intoxication. He had a 50 percent chance of surviving. But this time--unlike the time he applied for college or ran for student council president or took an educated guess on the AP exam--he wasn't lucky.

Despite all this, what saddened and alarmed me the most was the lack of interest that the death of an MIT freshman sparked in my own community, especially considering that his killer is something that intimately touches our lives at Yale.

The lack of reaction perhaps results from an illusion of invincibility. When we are young and our lives are laden with readings, paper assignments, friendships and social events, death and dying just seem too distant and unnatural to occupy our minds. We forget our mortality because we're too accustomed to life and living; we simply cannot imagine ourselves being nonexistent, as Krueger is now. Krueger's death seems irrelevant because we believe it will not happen to us, or to our friends.

The apathetic could also claim that it was Kreuger's own fault. Some assert that the responsibility of his death should be borne by no one but Krueger himself, as everyone is responsible for his or her own actions. Krueger was legally an adult, and if he chose to drink himself to death, did anyone have the right to stop him? People who make this argument believe that what happened to Krueger was merely a fatally stupid act by an inexperienced freshman who should have known when to stop.

Such arguments demonstrate a strange state of denial. They assume that people automatically make rational, informed choices anywhere, anytime, and that everyone who is an adult has enough self-control and integrity to withstand peer pressure. They disregard the fact that Krueger was probably already drunk when he decided to drink some more, and therefore unable to use his best judgement. They forget that he drank as part of the pledge process for Phi Gamma Delta, led by his frat brothers who were in a position of authority unlikely to be opposed, especially by a freshman eager to be accepted. And then, there is always the nagging question: why was he served anything in the first place?

We are blind if we can't see why this should concern us. Of course this could happen at Yale, or at Harvard, or anywhere else where peer pressure is combined with exhilarating freedom and the feeling of invincibility. When campus underage drinking is as rampant as it is uncontrollable, it's time we try to save us from ourselves, before another death brings harsh reality even closer to home.

Greta Gao is a freshman in Calhoun .

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