Sitting in a class of 50 students, you might see nine classmates drinking Mountain Dew, another four sipping on a Coke and three or more drinking Pepsi. About halfway through, the professor cracks open a soda of their own.

Head to the library when you finish with class and you’ll see even more Mountain Dew, Vanilla Coke and Wild Cherry Pepsi. We live off the stuff, we drink bottles and fill cups as though it flowed from a sacred fountain. Departments have entire refrigerators dedicated to it, T.A.s and professors teach with it and dorm rooms have constructed monuments and pyramids for it.

We run on soda. It’s the raging geyser that fuels our late-night study sessions and Xbox escapades against the Russians. It inspires us, writes our papers, keeps us awake and helps us lug through the long hours. Soda maintains our society.

After we go through late nights and stressful mornings, soda is the only thing that keeps us from killing one another and devolving into barbarians. The fact is that it is the fabric of our civilization and the root of America’s success for the past 200 years.

It is the sacred fountain from which our ancestors so desperately sought. From Herodotus and the ancients, through the romantic period and all across indigenous peoples, we spoke of restorative waters with which a single sip would renew our energies and revitalize our moods.

The Fountain of Youth was not found in 1513 with Ponce de Leon searching Florida, it was founded in 1886 when John Pemberton invented Coke in Georgia. It was the medical beverage of the age, claiming to cure many diseases. It acted well to fix morphine addiction, headache, depression, anxiety, fatigue, indigestion and impotence.

Only in the modern day have we found it to cure psychiatric illness and restore sanity to our population. Without it we’d dissolve into human sacrifices, tribal wars and maniacal violence.

So why in any circumstance would a “fat tax” be a decent idea? Taxing the beverages that we depend on is like taxing the anti-psychotics of your deranged roommates or issuing a toll to travel the sidewalks. Only madness will ensure causing our own devastation.

Attempting to restrict consumption to increase physical health will cause exponential increases in mental disorders, alcoholism and homicides. Day-to-day survival can depend on whether your editor has had his Coke or your classmates have had a Mountain Dew.

If you want society to crumble, then feel free to favor the “fat tax.” If you want to dry the fountain, favor the “fat tax.” However, if you want to keep American society strong, then keep our people provided with what they need. It’s not simply our soda, but our safety.