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One of my friends is phobic about clowns. Another gets freaked out when he sees a mime. Me, I'll take the docents at Plimouth Plantation and other historical attractions.

Bulbous red noses, floppy shoes, banging on invisible doors and climbing invisible staircases don't frighten me at all. But somebody who refuses to acknowledge it's not 1650 anymore... that's scary.

By the same token, you've got to believe somebody who is that committed to historical accuracy. And when a Plimouth Plantation docent tells a visitor the beverage of choice for Pilgrim children was "small beer," I don't even have to look it up. (But I did anyway. Small beer - with a low alcohol content, something like we call 3.2 beer today - remained popular at least until the time of Benjamin Franklin, who acknowledged he liked it at breakfast sometimes. Indeed, the Anchor Steam Brewing Co. in San Francisco continues to brew a small beer.)

Just think of it - the Pilgrims, those paragons of the virtue of never having any fun at all, who were known to be quite ashamed on the rare occasion when they might have done so by accident, poured low-test beer for the youngsters at that first Thanksgiving feast.

You live in a time of great moral laxity, or so some people would have you believe, but if you poured your children a beer, even the small variety, on Thursday, you did so at the risk of the Plainville or Wrentham police crashing through the door. Even worse than the trip before a judge that this would entail, you would spend a week or so in the stocks known as The Sun Chronicle reader comment blogs getting pummeled with verbal representations of rotten heads of lettuce. OK, I've gone overboard with those last remarks. The police raids on a few recent drinking parties in the King Philip area are an earnest response to the tragic death of Taylor Meyer, a lovely young woman from Plainville who wandered off from one of these parties and drowned. I expect the recent raids will prove to be effective to some degree, in that they target students who announce their parties on Facebook and the like, making them leaders, of a sort, of teen drinking. With luck, the courts will follow up on the police work by getting the arrested teens and hosts to accept full responsibility for what they've been up to.

Some applause is also in order for Mothers Against Drunk Driving and their recent sting campaign aimed at stopping people over the age of 21 from buying alcohol for minors.

Save the biggest share of praise for Kathi Meyer. By marching into court to confiscate pink bracelets worn in her daughter's memory by students nabbed at a subsequent drinking party, she has given them a lesson I suspect they will remember for the rest of their lives.

But will they learn anything about responsible drinking in the meantime?

You learned to swim by swimming.

To bicycle, by bicycling.

To do your trade by hitting the books and listening to your mentors.

Responsible drinking (you know, keeping it to one or two drinks spread out over a couple of hours)? Some kids may learn it at home. Others, however, may find the lessons there somewhat less valuable.

Massachusetts' leaders ought to be looking at the possibility of legalizing small beer - 3.2 percent alcohol - for 18-year-olds. They are old enough to give their lives on the warfront. They are old enough to vote. Experience from the 1970s shows they are not ready for full alcohol privileges - the 18-year-old drinking age of that era proved to be a boon for auto body shops and undertakers, but few others - but they ought to be allowed a transitional phase before reaching the no-holds-barred age of 21.

That wouldn't affect many of the children who have been arrested at the recent parties, but it would be a step toward dealing with their full range of responsibilities with honesty. Small beer was good enough for the Pilgrim kids. It ought to be legal for Massachusetts youth of today.

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.