Good morning. The legal drinking age in North Carolina is 21. Sometime years of maturity don’t match someone’s age.
The Town of Wake Forest is proposing the drinking of alcohol on the sidewalks of downtown. If the amendment to the town code passes, customers will be able to enjoy beer, wine and liquor at sidewalk tables.
I can understand why they want to do this. They think it will bring more people downtown. They will stay longer and spend more money. It also adds a “cool factor” to Wake Forest.
I’m all for allowing businesses to make more money, but I do have concerns.
Anyone who has ever been to a Friday Night on White sees what downtown can become with 40ish parents with beers in hand and their children running around like free range chickens. Men and women reliving their Frat Party days — men carrying around their stack of empty beer cups, like they are notches on a gun belt,and women, after a beer and half, assume the grace of a drunken one-night stand exiting a cab.
I have no problem with taking a drink, but I’ve never understood why parents would want to be drunk around their kids. What if an emergency happens? You going to drive drunk with your kid to the emergency room?
The behavior that is shown by many and many more during Friday Night on White would want me to not have more access to alcohol downtown, even more so, outside.
Now to the sidewalks. Is there enough room for tables full of patrons and sidewalk traffic?
You get a group of drinkers outside, are they going to care about Robert Johnson and his wheelchair, parents with baby carriages or the elderly trying to navigate their way to a day of shopping?
Case in point, the bicycle club that gathers on White Street during non Coranavirus days. They show no concern for sidewalk traffic while they are too wrapped up in fist bumping and spewing testosterone. If they have this attitude then, what will it become with alcohol in their system.
Wake Forest is simply not mature enough to handle this proposed option to drink on the sidewalks of downtown.
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