Imagine today is your twenty first birthday, you are finally turning the golden age which everyone except for the people who enforce the draft believes in the day you are an adult in America. You can throw a huge party, drink all of the alcohol that you want, and spend your time exactly how you choose to spend it. So you decide to go on vacation, alone or maybe with your girl friend or boy friend, to a nice place on the west coast.

You fly forever to get there with stops in Charlotte and Texas but finally you are on the ground in a southern California airport, the next step is to rent a car so that you can drive around while you are there. You go up to the car rental counter and a very kind older but not quite elderly lady in a white blouse and cheap skirt kindly asks you to fill out some information. Once they read your date of birth she kindly rejects you saying that you must be twenty five years old in order to rent a car.

So now you are in a predicament, you are stuck paying huge taxi fares to get around town and most frustrating of all that magic age of twenty one which you thought gave you all the freedoms of an adult turned out to be a lie.

As this website about rent a car Atlanta explains there are reasons why drivers that are under the age of twenty five cannot rent a vehicle, they cannot rent a truck in Atlanta or rent a van in Atlanta.

Rentals are simply not given out to people under the age of twenty five, period. Among the reasons offered are simple things like drivers who are not at the age of twenty five don’t understand the responsibility of a rental car, or that drivers who are under the age of twenty five have not had enough experience yet for the insurance companies to have confidence in their abilities.

This creates a dilemma and even causes us to wonder, why does society grant access to both cars and alcohol and everything else it keeps locked up but then continues to restrict the use of rental cars by those who are under 25. This compounds on top of the eighteen vs. twenty one year old problem because society tells you that you are an adult when you are eighteen but doesn’t treat you like one for basically another seven years.