Join me for a bit of a thought experiment. We live in a time where it is all too easy to reduce everything to simply binary, good vs bad, left vs right, my team vs yours. A great example is the nomination of Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party. Just a month ago, when people questioned whether Biden should continue to run, almost everyone agreed that she was an impossible replacement and there was no way she could win. Virtually no support from the party. But now she might give Trump a run for the money. Why? Did her record change all of a sudden? Was she secretly doing great things as our Vice President without us knowing? No. She’s just on the team against the other team, and all the drones fall into place. After all, we wouldn’t want those guys to win.
This got me thinking about alcohol.
If you were to research just about any of the famous doctors and motivational health gurus on YouTube, you would easily find a common theme: alcohol is bad for you. It is bad for your mental health, bad for your physical health, bad for your weight loss goals, bad for your longevity, and bad for just about every marker you could track. Just look at the science of it. There is no benefit to consuming alcohol; it is a toxin that you are willing to put into your body. And it can have terrible effects. Alcohol is bad.
Then again, there is far more to alcohol than its chemical makeup. Is alcohol bad? Sure, talk to any person with an addiction, and you can see the well-worn tracks of damage that alcohol has carved into their lives. And yet, there are countless others for whom alcohol provides something good. After all, out of the many drugs available, alcohol is incredibly social. Even in an age of cell phones, you will still find strangers talking to each other at a bar. They come from all walks of life with incredible and fascinating stories, and yet they’ve arrived together at one place for a drink, or two, or more. Sitting over their glasses, they begin to talk. If you’re brave enough and patient enough, you can hear a total stranger’s whole life story at a bar. You might find yourself sharing in their griefs and commiserating in their heartache, but you may just as quickly celebrate a recent victory with them or even wish them a happy birthday.
Alcohol, in the form of a cold beer after working in the yard on a hot day or a glass of bourbon after dinner with the wife, is more than a toxin entering your body. There is something about life in this, something good.
The problem is our tendency to reduce it to one or the other, to declare it either good for all or bad for everyone. We make it only the happy social bar scene or the chemical destroying your brain cells. But life is far more complicated than any of this. Sure, you could live by the binary choices presented before us, which would be easier, but I think you’d be missing out on a lot.
Perhaps it’s okay to say our team is in a rebuilding year, that we shouldn’t win, and that it won’t be good for the country. At the very least it would be good for us all to see beyond the binary options presented. Yes, this makes things far more complicated, but there’s also much more joy here. And I think we could all use that.
