Correspondent of the day 6/19
18 Is Too Young To Be an Adult
Editor, Times-Dispatch: I am not surprised to read of the necessity for legislation to protect students from credit card debt. It continues the list of things 18-20-year-olds have proven they cannot responsibly handle since they were declared adults by law in 1974. This was enacted in an attempt to rectify the injustices of requiring a young person in the military to go to war although he could not legally drink alcohol nor vote.
Anyone who has ever reared a child to adulthood knows 18-20-year-olds are not adults and no law can make it so. Would not it have been wiser to have retained the age of majority at 21 and exempted anyone under that age from being sent into combat? No politician should be allowed to send a minor into the horrors of war.
We must stop playing political games with the lives of our children and return the age of legal adulthood to 21, thus giving them back their childhood and returning to parents authority over their children.
Elizabeth Pool.
Quinton.
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Reader Reactions
An idea I toyed with once was that the law be changed to voting, purchasing weapons, alcohol, and obtaining credit, you must be 21 years old. With only ONE exception.
You join the military. Once you’re in the military, you will get a military id that allows you to “override” that law, and those avenues are reopened.
It was just a thought to regulate the process.
I would agree that 18 is too young to be an adult. That is if you shelter and baby your children instead of raising them to be men and women.
I know plenty of 18 and 19 years old, whom I served with, that have more maturity than the 30 and 40 year olds I work with now.
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