Getting Watered Down

Last Saturday night, the authorities back in Muncie set another example for us to think about when they paid Zeta Beta Tau an unexpected visit & cracked down on roughly 2 dozen folks in an attempt to stem underage drinking. That being everyone's first official weekend back at school, if you're lucky enough to dodge the system by laying low, the chances of you not getting caught are pretty good. But if you're not lucky enough & if you happen to be underage, then law enforcement will act accordingly, no questions asked.

This is the first time in quite awhile where we've had to deal with a crackdown of such magnitude at Ball State, especially if it's at a fraternity house. For those who can recall over 3 years ago, Lambda Chi Alpha (R.I.P.) got busted along the exact same lines, but their bust took on greater magnitude & more importance then, while they were still on campus & while their house was still in existence, in no small part to the number of people who were at their party & some duders who decided to give away a little secret of where they were at earlier that night.

Looking back on the Lambda Chi incident, I can't help but wonder. Have we learned anything of value from that uneventful night? For those who remember, I feel we learned something about not only ourselves, but also about the gnawing issue of complacency, the impression that such things can't happen to us under our own roof. It wouldn't matter if we were the #1 fraternity on campus; the authorities in situations like these aren't discriminatory & in the case of Lambda Chi Alpha, they weren't discriminatory by any means.

For those who don't...it's time to come full circle to now. If there is something to be learned from this whole crackdown, even though it turned out to be an awesome weekend overall, we as members of the Greek community or no, cannot afford to carry around a casual air of complacency as if to say, "The police can't nail us." Well, if they could nail ZBT, they could come to anyone's fraternity house & issue a good ol' crackdown, no questions asked. It's not that they were on a witch hunt on Saturday night & they convened with one goal in mind: "Hey man, let's make life miserable for the ZBT house tonight!!" As part of a much bigger crackdown which BTW netted 74 folks, this took time & effort to keep things with law enforcement from getting thrown out of joint. Things happened like so & if this latest raid (the first recent one we've had for quite awhile, in fact!!) doesn't get us thinking, it should.

Now another fraternity has made the news headlines for all the wrong reasons; that same said fraternity is also going to face the music which the university is going to play in a short while. If we as fellow Greeks prefer not to make frontpage news in a negative light like the Delts did last year (& now Zeta Beta Tau), risk management needs to keep aware & act as they see fit. And this of course means not falling asleep on the job. Not to forget: one cannot get complacent here either. At a time like this, who can?