As a general rule, I don’t usually like to write my Student Life columns as the “Call-to-Arms” sort of articles. Such essays, for this lowly humanities student, tend to display an unsettlingly large level of disconnect with the real world. However, occasionally there is an issue so large, so important, that I feel it is my duty as an unpaid non-journalism major to properly address it. The subject of today’s article is such.

You might have heard of the Amethyst Initiative—it’s been making the rounds of all of the big corporate news outlet lately. I first read about it last Wednesday in an Internet article from the Baltimore Inquirer, but scarcely 24 hours had passed before ABC, NBC and CNN were all echoing the story, as well as any other network which three otherwise unassuming letters could get their hands upon. The issue: alcohol.

The Amethyst Initiative is a petition signed exclusively by university presidents and chancellors who wish to express their support for lowering the drinking age to 18. There are many good reasons why the drinking age should be lowered. Some have previously been expounded by this writer, and others have been elaborated much more convincingly by others. This article does not set out to convince the reader that the drinking age ought to be lowered; rather, it assumes that this viewpoint has already been reached, and it hopes to assure the proponent of such a change that the Amethyst Initiative is the beginning of our eventual success.

Allow me to explain: The Amethyst Initiative, in the present day, is almost certainly and inexorably doomed to fail. This is no mere prediction, but rather a fact of life. The simple truth is this: 95 percent of the people in America would find it hard to give even two lowly darns about what more than 100 presidents of the most esteemed colleges in America have to say. This is the sort of country we live in, and I would hope that, at this point, such an observation takes no one by surprise. So when Harvard and Yale say to lower the drinking age, the rest of the country is lucky if it manages to sober up long enough to grab the message.  If anyone thinks that this current effort will yield results, then they must be an optimist of such strong credentials that they think that Ron Paul might still take the presidency. But I digress.

As I said, the Amethyst Initiative is doomed to failure. This is cold hard fact, with which I will never disagree. But here is the beauty of the movement: Failed political initiatives, when founded on at least vaguely populist notions, have the wondrous tendency to give birth to buoyant new sentiments, aflame with the desire for magnificent change to finally occur. Even as the Amethyst Initiative is buried prematurely in a shallow grave, a magnificent phoenix of public opinion may yet soar above the realm of MADD-enforced highway funding. The students of the future will think to themselves: “Why, yes, efforts to lower the drinking age may have failed in the past, but look who supported the last attempt! All of the official smartest people in America! If they can try and fail, then perhaps this new generation can try and succeed.”

And it is for such a reason, my dear and fellow students of Washington University in St. Louis, that I must bring to your attention a very notable absence from the Amethyst Initiative signers: one Mark S. Wrighton, Chancellor of our supposedly noble university, has yet to lend his John Hancock to this piece of revolutionary parchment. I don’t quite know about you, my readers, but I have yet to find a university with a more realistic and successful alcohol policy than our own. The fact that the de facto leader of this university has not joined the ranks of the rest of the nation’s brightest and signed the Amethyst Initiative is despicable, and we should direct all of the scorn we can muster toward our Chancellor, in the hopes that he might one day see the light—for a single signature can inspire a thousand voices, and one day, a thousand voices might just allow for one legal 18-year-old brewski.