The NY Post reports on the death of Andrew Walker, 19, who was arrested after an incident at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Texas Christian University:
Walker and another fraternity brother, Christopher Barker, allegedly plied freshman pledges with vodka shots and forced them to eat expired guacamole. The alleged hazing resulted in one of the freshmen landing in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Authorities said his blood alcohol level was determined to be so high that he could’ve died.
IN THE COMMENTS: Eric the Fruit Bat said...
So it turns out that four stories is enough to do it? Good to know.
I said:
I lived across from a one-story building that was the jump-off for a suicide. I don't want to suggest how the man did that in a way that he must have known would work, because I don't want to given anyone any ideas. Don't kill yourselves.
Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now. Somehow, the celebrities never kill themselves. They just keep fighting, but the young don't have the perspective of success. Only hopelessness. Please hang on, children.
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When I was in college, theKappa Sigs had a pledge die during hazing when he chocked on a piece of raw liver they making him swallow. My fraternity hazing resembled Delta House in "Animal House."
Choked.
So it turns out that four stories is enough to do it? Good to know.
I am a teetotaler now, but I once lead the league in beer consumption during my college years. It's a wonder I got out alive. Really.
I will not judge other's behavioral choices, but I do question the benefits of alcohol. I am sure there are some advantages, but they escape me. It's a pretty good clue when you must be an adult to consume.
At Nebraska (as it was then so it is now) only a bit more than 50% of freshmen who enroll end up graduating. 18yr olds from farm country are put in a dorm building with more people than their town; for first time in their lives they can do stuff w/o whole town finding out. Toleration of binge drinking and the ridiculous greek system crap seemed almost like an institutional way of encouraging the kids w/o self control, dignity or values to fail early and leave. And it did and does work.
I lived across from a one-story building that was the jump-off for a suicide. I don't want to suggest how the man did that in a way that he must have known would work, because I don't want to given anyone any ideas. Don't kill yourselves.
Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now. Somehow, the celebrities never kill themselves. They just keep fighting, but the young don't have the perspective of success. Only hopelessness. Please hang on, children.
It used to be that his family and friends would hope that he learned something from this and more than just "forcing people to drink is bad". They would have told him, no one died from the hazing and at least someone had the sense to get medical help for the guy. Learn from this, move on, and use the experience to try to become a better person.
Now what do you tell someone who screwed up? All mistakes you make when you're young may be used to try to ruin your life 35 years from now. You'll never be free from this no matter how well you live your life.
Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing,
Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
Mama, ooh, ooh
Didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters
Too late, my time has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Body's aching all the time
Goodbye everybody, I've got to go
Bohemian Rhapsody
Very sad. This young man should have been given some therapy or support to be able to deal. Did he have no friends or family to help him through this? Ah. Well. We can only second guess, which isn't helpful in the least.
I cant help but think some of this goes back to parenting. Wraping kids in bubble wrap and setting up life so that failure, or losing never happens, keeping the kids from having to deal with pain, is short term thinking. On of dads favorite sayings was "they can kill you but they cant eat you".
Stupid non-sequitur right? Yep, but in the process of explaining to him how his statement made no sense, and besides, the worse case scenario I was mired in was the end of my existence, I was force to come to grips with what the worst case scenario actually meant, and 99% of the time it dealt with looking bad in front of other people I didn't know or care about. Dad and Mom allowing me to make bad decisions, deal with the fallout, and move on with life, taught me things were never as bad as I would imagine. That was being taught to me before kindergarten, and continued as I matured, and risks increased. Do I want to get kicked out of class? school?.Lose my license? drink and kill a buddy?,get fired? and on and on.
Handing out participation trophies, hurt, not help, kids.
Hmmmmm.. I didn't ready Mary Beth first.
She has a good point. According to the Kavanaugh dog and pony show, this kid's life, college career, and future plans WERE thoroughly fucked. Might as well just end it all then.
plied freshman pledges
When plying is outlawed, only outlaws will have pliers.
Funny that they arrested someone for "offering" alcohol to someone else. Underage or something?
So it turns out that four stories is enough to do it? Good to know.
You can die by just falling over from a standing position and hitting your head on concrete; this is the velocity (~ 23 mph) /force that motorcycle helmets and designed to address.
"helmets are designed"
Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now.
Indeed.
Notice how Weinstein isn't in the news.... ever.
Now what do you tell someone who screwed up? All mistakes you make when you're young may be used to try to ruin your life 35 years from now. You'll never be free from this no matter how well you live your life.
***But only if you're not in line with The Party(D).
In my pledge year, a pledge across the street at another fraternity drank himself to death. He wasn't forced to do it, but wanted to be the one who drank the most. I know because I knew two of his fellow pledges. We the people do very stupid things.
And Texas kids have Dazed and Confused to look up to.
You will be forgiven only if you are a loyal corruptocrat.
Notice how Weinstein isn't in the news.... ever.
A little bit - the case(s) against him are falling apart.
"Prosecutors in New York City abandoned part of their sexual assault case against Harvey Weinstein" because of a crooked "lead police detective".
"A New York judge dismissed count six of Harvey Weinstein's criminal indictment Thursday, which was a criminal sexual act in the first degree."
Of course, "prosecutors abandoned" might mean the same thing as "judge dismissed", what with the fakey news.
"It just makes me sad about how dull America has become in The Era of That's Not Funny."
"Please hang on, Children"
Nah - go for it.
"Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now."
Maybe he killed himself because of the alcohol-induced black-outs and rape.
I am Laslo.
"Please hang on children."
That's so nice. Except that there's no leniency and no second chances for those evil fraternity brothers.
"You'll never be free from this no matter how well you live your life."
Exactly. And even if you don't do anything stupid, you are at risk, especially as a white man.
If they can do it to Kavanaugh, they can do it to you.
Of course, the collateral damage is itself a prog tool: instilling fear is another way to scorch the earth.
"When I was in college, theKappa Sigs had a pledge die during hazing when he chocked on a piece of raw liver they making him swallow. My fraternity hazing resembled Delta House in "Animal House.""
Hey, wasn't the choking on a piece of raw liver in a CSI episode? It was interesting because Sarah Sittle was working with Nick Stokes on the case. She had the normal leftist distain for fraternities, while he had been in a fraternity in college. Her distain just got in the way of solving the case, while his fraternity experience allowed him to call BS on the bros, when necessary. It turned out that it was the liver that had killed the pledge. It was tied to a string, but slipped off. The guy who did it got help in the coverup by promising that his father, a prominent criminal atty, would get them off if anything went wrong.
When I went through fraternity initiation, it was very middle of the road - a little hazing, but mostly sleep deprivation. It was Interesting three years later on the other side, when I ran the initiation as president of the house (and was responsible to the school for any hazing incidents). In any case, we were told that in the old days, things were much worse (my father kept his paddle, which he had had to make, riddled with holes, from his own initiation). We were the Vietnam generation, and the class two ahead of us had blown up, losing much of the pledge class. Hazing was a big thing, a big no no, even back then, a half a century ago this year. The two houses that did real hazing were the FiGis and the Kappa Sigs. My brother went Beta, and their initiation was much more like yours and the Animal House Deltas. As I said, ours was in the middle, very serious, but with the only real hazing being sleep deprivation. And no drinking by the pledges until after the initiation (where the presidents, who had just initiated the new classes, had a year to year competition on drinking boiler makers - I lost badly to a guy two years ahead, who, despite his incipient alcoholism, went on to be a successful brain surgeon).
Interesting thing to me is that hazing seems to be on a pendulum. When I was in college, it was mostly very mild. Then, a decade or two later, there will be a rash of these deaths during pledgeship, and fraternities would have to cut hazing way back for awhile. Rinse and repeat. Making things worse, colleges, and esp smaller ones, tend to be run by the left anymore, and most of them were not part of the Greek system when they were undergrads. So, there seems to be this dynamic of the administration just waiting for fraternities to screw up, so that they can be kicked off campus, followed by a drying up of contributions (inevitably, Greeks contribute much more as alumns than non-Greeks, on a per capita basis), followed usually by a loosening up on the Greeks. Rinse and repeat. This dynamic of Greeks being the strongest college boosters was on show a year ago at our 45th reunion, where between 2/3 and 3/4 of the attendees had been fraternity or sorority members, when we were only maybe 1/4 when we were in college. Maybe it is living and partying with the same guys for three years, but a lot of us are still decently close a half a century later. Or at least keep up with each other.
"Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now."
Sometimes, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
This sort of thing is why people joined the French Foreign Legion, or the Egyptian army, or "went Turk", or went West, or East of Suez, where "there ain't no ten commandments and a man can raise a thirst".
Its why Kipling wrote "Gentlemen Rankers".
Also a good reason to consider joining a monastic order. But this is no longer an option in the cultural menu.
Not so easy, these days, as Mary Beth says. Besides all your sins being on your permanent record, there is nowhere to go to escape it.
I've seen people fall off ladders (not relatives) and die. 8-10 feet off the ground.
People slip and fall in the shower and die. Altitude: Zero.
Strangely people have fallen out of airplanes at 10-20 thousand without a parachute and lived. Of course, they were banged up a little.
Does all this stuff occur more often, or is it just more widely known because of the internet?
It seems that every time someone does something dumb,crazy, weird, or criminal the entire USA hears about it within 24 hours.
"Frat bros busted for booze-fueled hazing with expired guacamole."
The death of senorita guacamole is the story that Kavanaugh and Judge hid from the Senate Committee and from the FBI. Her name was Mary and her nude body was found bloodied in front of a cracked mirror. The smell of vodka was strong. Thus the legend of Bloody Mary had its battered blended beginning. Kavanaugh denied any involvement, but suspiciously he stated, "I liked bloody Marys. I still like bloody Marys."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Mary_%28folklore%29
A friend of mine did construction work with some occasional roofing. He would never work on a two story roof. Single story was it for him. His thought process was that you would most likely recover with a few broken bones from a fall. Not a guarantee, but likely. Add a second story and the ballgame changes.
I used to think the "fell off a ladder and died" was a television trope, but no longer. I had occasion to spend time in the waiting room at the ICU unit at Vanderbilt University medical center, and met a wife there whose husband fell off of one and hit the back of his head from about 6 feet up- he was expected to die.
Five stories is the 50-50 proposition for a fall.
A purposeful jump is different.
Piece of folk wisdom from my years growing up in the Northwest: Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now.
I could not agree more. I don't want it to be like that. We are a better country when we have a sense of humor and offer redemption.
" And my friend Brian Temple
He thought he could make it
So from the third story he jumped
And he missed the swimming pool only by inches
...... everyone said he was drunk" - Lyle Lovett
“Strangely people have fallen out of airplanes at 10-20 thousand without a parachute and lived. Of course, they were banged up a little.”
Once you’ve fallen about 1000 feet, you’re at terminal velocity. That’s as fast as you’ll fall. If you jump from a really high altitude where the air is thin, you’ll reach a higher terminal velocity but will actually slow down as you fall into denser air.
Yes, some people have survved falls from high altitude without a parachute but the odds are very much aganst it. As we old paratroopers used to joke, you call fall for thousands of feet and not get a scratch. It’s the last quarter inch that kills you.
I've seen a Latino roofer fall off the back of a two storied home with a full walk out, that's close to forty feet. He just laid there for about five minutes, brushed himself off and limped up the ladder to resume roofing.
In another case a Latino roofer fell and was dead five minutes after he hit the ground. I ask the builder what the ramifications were, he said none, he was pretty much boxed up and sent to his family in Honduras.
I'm the Professor's age, My frat was a lot like Animal House, but we dressed better. We had advantages other frat houses didn't have we were off campus. The only hazing happened during "Hell Week", it was mostly sleep deprivation, pledges wearing the same clothing all week, sleeping in the house basement and no bathing. We found out who the smart and innovative pledges were as they cheated on the bathing. We also encouraged kidnapping of pledges by active members and visa versa. I can't go into the rituals, I'd have to kill you.
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