Imagine yourself, soaking up the sun and drinking margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean. As palm trees sway in the breeze you think to yourself, “maybe later I will take my rental car to a local casino for some blackjack before returning to Iowa State to declare my independence.”

Unfortunately, you can’t do any of these things because you aren’t 21 yet. Forget about that yacht offshore, ready to whisk you around the world. You can’t win if you can’t play, and you can’t play Powerball because of an age distinction which makes it illegal for anyone under 21 to buy tickets in Iowa. You won’t be able to enter a casino, either. That right is reserved for those who have crossed over into the second threshold of maturity as well. You can’t even rent a car until you are 25. And as far as your independence goes, you might live in your own apartment, pay all of your bills and think you are an adult, but the federal government reserves the right to consider you a dependent until you are either married or 24 years of age. Anything to thin the herd when it comes to student loans.

Even though it is entirely reasonable for any citizen of the United States to vote, to drive, to marry, or to serve in the military as soon as they reach 18 years of age, lawmakers still feel that it is legitimate to raise the bar occasionally. When it comes to limiting the rights of it’s citizenry to participate in activities which any other adult can engage in, our leaders feel that anything goes as long as they are calling in to question our maturity to handle carious activities.

Maturity is subjective in the extreme. Limiting people’s basic rights because of their age merely compounds the ignorance. The fact that fewer accidents occur when we raise the drinking age is not significant enough reason to accept these arbitrary limits. Perhaps if we raise the legal drinking age to 65 we could reduce the number of citations for DUI even further. We debate the validity of trying 15-year-olds as adults for their crimes but no one even bats an eye when suddenly the government raises the legal age for gambling or drinking.

At some point we simply have to say that this an adult, legally responsible and entitled to all benefits of age. And that age should be 18.