Twist Off Tops

I don’t know if you ever thought about it but I think a good deal of our nation’s ills can be blamed on twist off tops on beer bottles.

No I don’t mean because we drink too much beer. And we are as a nation drinking more, a lot more now than we were just 12 years ago, with the most notable increases coming in binge and heavy drinking. A lot of that can be blamed – according to sociologists and psychologists – on the great recession and the continuing poor job market for millennials, a group that has largely rediscovered spirits.

What I’m talking about is the decline in creativity and the ability to solve problems in common sense ways. Something that – I believe – is directly related to the demise of a rite of passage that young people traditionally went through when confronted by a case a beer and no bottle opener.

They would find ways to open these imprisoned adult beverages with hinges, pliers, a chrome bumper on a 64 Buick, and even their teeth. As they grew older they would build bars in their basements out of 2X4’s and hang a bottle opener to one with a can underneath to catch the tops. These were common sense solutions to the everyday problem of not being able to find a bottle opener when you needed one.

We could use some of those common sense creative juices in our country today to solve our biggest problems. We could even sit down in the shade next to our Buicks like the buddies we ought to be with a case of beer and work them out.

Alas, that’s just a pipe dream, you see the bumpers on today’s cars are all made of plastic.