Where were the grown ups?

Newspaper Article

By: ALEXANDRA PETRI | Richmond Times Dispatch
Published: February 29, 2012 

George Huguely V has been convicted of second-degree murder.

If this had happened a year later, it would still have been a sensation. Two graduates of a "Prestigious Institution," from "Nice Families," one sporting a V at the end of his name, caught in a miserable tangle of alcohol and strong emotions. Two lives destroyed by violence. It's an adult tragedy.

But it happened at college.

Watching the trial of the University of Virginia lacrosse player on charges of killing his estranged girlfriend, Yeardley Love, I was struck as much by what wasn't said as what was.

This was a story of growing up in a world where people sand off life's edges on your behalf. Where parents and institutions protect you not from mistakes but from consequences.

This was a sensational trial from a world of people who don't watch sensational trials, a world where the objection to murder is not that it will out but that it won't do.

It was a tragedy of lacrosse, that football for the wealthy. At one point the defense tried the argument that Huguely is "not complicated. He's not complex. He's a lacrosse player."

This sort of thing does not happen to people like this.

The setting, however, was a character on its own: the college campus, where hook-up culture runs rampant and you are expected to drink four times a week, where you can sleep with someone and he can come to the witness stand and say that you were just friends, and it can be true. It's a no-man's land in which everyone wants to have fun without consequence. Where people are just mature enough to act immaturely.

Huguely sent Love a handwritten note saying that alcohol was ruining his life. He choked her. He threatened her. Huguely's friends said that, at one point, they thought of staging an intervention because of his drinking. They didn't. Why would they? They were college students.

Colleges around the country are playing the part of those parents who host drinking parties. "Better here," they tell themselves, watching another car pull onto the lawn. "Better here where I can see them."
The University of Virginia's substance abuse prevention center notes that 71 percent of the school's students drink on a typical Saturday night, with 20 percent consuming more than six standard drinks and 18 percent consuming four to five.

Under the best of circumstances, drugs, alcohol, sex, sports and a lack of supervision can be a potent and bewildering combination. When things are going badly, it's impossible.

Where were the adults?

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