Guns don't

kill people, fraternities do. In the latest pinball game

of who's-to-blame, accusations have been bouncing around

like pinballs in an arcade concerning the recent death of

fraternity pledge Ben Grantham.

I know about hazing. I was

semi-brutalized in college. When I wanted to join the

Alpha Tau Sigma fraternity at the small Atlanta college

where I eventually graduated, they warned me of the

dangers. It was the most popular of the fraternities at

my school, (All the basketball players were members) and

was difficult to join. Being a tough guy and 6 feet 2

inches, 225 pounds, I thought I could handle it. The last

night of initiation was awful. It was humiliating and

painful. Fun? Yeah, that too.

Our final night of

"passage" was a simple culmination of a rush

week that basically consisted of being tied up, and

thrown into a different woodsy setting each night. For

the "last rites" initiation, we were stripped

naked, gagged, blindfolded and forced to run around naked

in our gymnasium while our ill-prepared

"executioners" would think up things to do to

us. I was mostly worried that they hadn't covered the gym

door windows and some possible, future paramour of mine

would walk by and be blinded by the sheer size and

brightness of my exposed lily-white flesh.

The most painful of the

rituals involved a tennis racket being pressed against

our chests and a hairbrush being whisked harshly across

the sensitive parts that protruded. I don't recall a lot

else except that they did finally let us put on

underwear, only it was not our own and it was loaded with

peanut butter. We all got incredible Jif wedgies;

chunky-style at that! For one kid who resisted, they made

the rest of us cover his derriere with black shoe polish.

He had a patent leather shine for weeks after.

What happened to Ben

Grantham was terrible, but it was an accident. Sure, frat

initiations are decadent, crazy and tough, but nobody's

out there to hurt or maim anyone physically, or scar

anyone emotionally. Most of the time it really is just

about fun. There is no grand conspiracy to punish certain

innocent victims.

Hazing like what I endured

should not happen any more. Not because it affected me

for any time longer than it took to get a shower and go

to Pizza Hut afterwards, but because people are more

vulnerable emotionally now. And these people have

lawyers. Like all colleges, my alma mater has long since

become more strident in their supervision of such

organizations. But what's the fun in that?

Truth be known, my college

experience was beans compared to joining my high school

football team. Your first year on the team, after some

day's August practice - you never knew - the

whole team would hold you down while one of the seniors

"taped" you; that is, totally covered your

privates (as my granddaddy would say) with athletic tape!

Believe me, the age-old argument of which works better,

"pulling it off slowly, or just yanking it off

fast," never became more personal.

We seem to forget there are

worse problems than hazing. Forget about campus drinking

that saps the life out of more kids in a month than any

fraternal organization ever did in a decade. Forget about

rampant college lifestyles that cause more pain and

suffering than any hazing ever could. And forget about

the Frat Party: our civilization's version of "rape

and pillage," only there, the victims are invited.

Yes, forget all this. Let's do what we always do, take

our minds off the real problems in life and focus on some

isolated, extracted incident and make it our mission.

[Visit Billy Murphy on

the Internet at https://billymurphy.homepage.com.]