We poor students just can’t seem to take care of ourselves these days. Whether we’re stumbling over our own feet in darkened alleyways or vomiting at will along University Avenue, it’s nothing short of miraculous we are able to dress and feed ourselves on a daily basis. After all, if you took the horror stories repeated by Capitol Neighborhoods Inc. to heart, you’d think we were functionally disabled as a result of all the alcohol we pound down on the weekends.

Certainly, CNI’s sincere worry over our perpetually inebriated state was obvious at its panel held last Thursday night. Dr. Richard Brown, a concerned member and physician, defended us lowly creatures: “It wasn’t their fault that they got born into this alcohol culture that makes it normal to go out and get really wasted.”

And yet, this paralyzing scourge still manages to spread to those non-Wisconsinites! Even as Wisconsin natives parade around the carousel of bars in a stupor, those who have come to the University of Wisconsin from across the country need only the aroma of a Jack and Coke or a local brew to lose control of their faculties.

CNI had solutions to be sure. In order to save us from ourselves, CNI has suggested a quota of citations be set to stop us from drinking ourselves to death. However, considering that idea was already shot down by Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, CNI has come up with a novel idea to try and stop this epidemic from spreading beyond the boundaries of our alcohol-soaked student body: Talk to them.

We believe this to be a brilliant idea, one of the true strokes of genius CNI has thought up. Unfortunately — and maybe this is just the booze talking — their execution seems just a little off.

First off, Thursday’s panel did not actually include any students. While longtime resident Rosemary Lee is a fixture of the downtown neighborhood, she is not exactly the sort of student input we had in mind. We brought up this issue last year when CNI’s idea of reaching out to students was holding a meeting advertised only in the Isthmus and the TITU.� So it is bewildering that CNI would hold another meeting with similar goals and still fail to contact any students or bring them into this discussion.

But then again, we are much like wild, dangerous animals, aren’t we? Bringing us into a meeting room to discuss alcohol would be like letting an elephant loose in a peanut packaging plant. So CNI has a different approach. Oscar Perez, a neighborhood relations specialist at UW-Milwaukee, proposed CNI members walk around student neighborhoods at night and reach out to inebriated students in a “non-threatening” manner.

We’re not sure if that includes offering late night snacks, but we’re uncertain such daring measures will work on students in the wrong frame of mind.

Since CNI seems to either be afraid of hostile students or unaware of how to speak to them, we encourage them to have a test run with this board. If any member of CNI wishes to discuss their concerns and plans regarding students’ insatiable alcohol consumption with actual students, they can sit down and speak with this board — maybe over a couple beers.

Don’t worry, we assure you we don’t bite.