The US has a strange relationship with alcohol, and that is probably a bit of an understatement.
Traveling around a great deal over the years, I have seen considerable evidence to support my belief that the rest of the world simply doesn't see alcohol with the same eyes as we do in the USA.
Last Friday I had lunch with a fellow teacher; she from France and me from the USA. Together we talked about all manner of language teaching topics, politics, and culture. But the thing that most caused her surprise was that, when I went to take a picture of my beautiful lunch (below), I made sure to set aside the glass of beer that I was drinking. "I can't have beer in the picture if I'm going to share it with my students," I explained. She blinked and her face was a mask of confusion.
When she asked why not, I had to go into a great deal of explanation about our culture and how it would be considered inappropriate to show minors a picture of an alcoholic drink in a public school. Though we both speak Spanish very well, I'm convinced that I was not able to explain the situation to her satisfaction.
To make sure that I wasn't just living in a bubble of isolation, I asked a couple of my American colleagues their opinions over dinner the next night. Both of them enthusiastically agreed with me that having alcohol in the picture would not be considered appropriate. But none of us could come up with a compelling reason for that particular societal norm.
Cultural norms concerning alcohol are very different elsewhere in the world. Living in Argentina I recall drinking wine once with my colleagues in the teachers' lounge to celebrate a birthday. In Chile I was unable to explain the rationale behind a drinking game to a group of people. As far as they were concerned, if one wanted to get drunk, there were easier ways to do it than a list of complicated game rules. And in Japan, we drank beer, sake, and whisky every time we went out. Here in Spain the cafeteria in the building where my classes are held, unapologetically sells beer. That is to say, one
could drink beer in the classroom during instruction.
How does one teach about Hispanic culture without the mention of beer and wine, I wonder? After having spent a semester in Mendoza, the wine-producing region of Argentina, I found that there were very very few of my photos that didn't have alcohol in them somewhere. Tours of bodegas, wine tasting, garden parties, even just dinner - wine everywhere. (And no one was getting drunk or being irresponsible.)
Meanwhile in the USA it is illegal for people under the age of 21 to drink at all - one can neither possess nor consume. Happy Hour has become illegal most everywhere. The police conduct random sobriety checks on the highway - stopping innocent people with no reason whatsoever, except that they
might have consumed alcohol. And establishments, such as bars, are held responsible for the safety and conduct of their drinking patrons - instead of the patrons themselves being held accountable for themselves. (As if one were defenseless to the power of alcohol and needed others to take responsibility for them.)
Taking the beer out of the photo is not going to change anyone's reality, of course. It is not as though our students don't know about alcohol. They also should know that we teachers, as adults, are allowed to drink it. Showing a photo of alcohol is not the same as condoning underage drinking. It is not as though there is something so inherently bad about alcohol . . . or maybe, in the minds of some people, there is?
I do not like the unhealthy relationship that the US has with alcohol. Obviously no one wants there to be alcohol-related deaths and injuries, but I do not think that our laws and our fiercely conservative approach to alcohol consumption seem to have a great deterrent effect. Quite the contrary; our youth seem to have an obsession with alcohol that I don't see paralleled anywhere else in the world.
I suppose it is just this; cultures are different. It is one of the reasons that we travel.
Hasta pronto,
--AnneK
