WHEN I WAS a student at Earlham College in Indiana, I co-hosted an alcohol-free dance party. Fry House, which was owned by the university, held a reputation for wild parties before we established it as Interfaith House in 1997. We — a group of religiously observant and spiritually curious undergrads — wanted to bring a new spirit into our house. I had been to enough drunken high school parties that I chose not to drink in college, other housemates had parents with alcoholism, and some abstained for religious reasons. We posted flyers, twisting a beer slogan into our hook: “Why ask why? Try Fry Dry!”
When the big night came, we pushed the furniture aside, laid out snacks, turned up the music, and swallowed our pride when only one person showed up.
This memory returned when I noticed with some surprise how Dry January, which has an app called “Try Dry,” has become a global movement. In 2013, the nonprofit Alcohol Concern (now “Alcohol Change UK”) invited people to abstain from alcohol in January; 4,000 people signed up. In 2022, 130,000 people signed up, with many more participating around the world. As alcohol-related deaths, especially among women, rose in that same period, Dry January began to take hold.
In May 2020, Saturday Night Live’s “Let Kids Drink” music video parodied our skyrocketing alcohol consumption. Children chug from wine bottles and join the chorus as a weary parent sings, “Children are the future / And right now the future stinks. / So let kids drink!” I laughed and poured myself another glass of wine. My alcohol consumption rose between 2018 and 2023, as it did for caregivers across the U.S. Alcohol became a socially accepted balm for the isolation and stress exacerbated by the pandemic. The dark humor of “Let Kids Drink” pokes fun at a real problem. At one point, the music cuts out and one singer says to another, “Are you okay?”
Last summer someone close to me went to a 30-day residential rehab for alcoholism, and I decided to quit drinking alcohol in solidarity. I’ve found that many of my heroes who led the fight in our nation’s anti-slavery, women’s rights, and civil rights movements were quite vocal about alcohol’s impact on society’s health. “Whisky arms the hand of violence,” Frederick Douglass wrote in 1887. Mohandas Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells, and Malcolm X held a mutual disdain for the alcohol industry’s grip on people’s lives. Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of Smashing the Liquor Machine, points out that activists who decried racist violence, patriarchy, and colonialism often raged against “predatory capitalism and the immorality of” profiting from addiction.
I’m not putting up any flyers, but Dry January is an open invitation. It’s worth a try.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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