By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

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 http://billymurphy.homepage.com.]

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