Reporters and editors are attracted to news the way birds flock to birdseed and ducks go after bread.

It’s our passion because we love what we do, and we love serving our communities.

One of our jobs at the Herald is to sift through the morning’s state, national and international news and pick the most important stories and get those into the paper.

One of them in particular caught my eye recently.

The Associated Press reported that roughly 100 of the nation’s university presidents are urging lawmakers to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18.

“The movement called the Amethyst Initiative quietly began recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age,” the article stated.

It went on to report that more than 500,000 full-time students at four-year colleges suffer injuries each year related in some way to drinking, and about 1,700 die in such accidents. It added that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 to 2005.

It’s obvious here there is a problem, and college presidents seem to be under the impression that by lowering the drinking age, the binge drinking will decrease because students will be more likely to head into bars instead of being fed alcohol by the upperclass students in the dorm rooms.

Baloney.

What we need is for our parents, educators and the students themselves to take a more active role in increasing awareness to this problem and to use plain common sense.

When I was a freshman at St. Mary’s College in Winona, now St. Mary’s University, the buzz around campus was that Wisconsin was considering lowering its drinking age to 18. Everyone was excited, for about two minutes.

Then everyone realized it wasn’t going to happen, we all forgot about it and in three years everyone was 21 anyway and it didn’t matter.

This latest effort seems like one of those phases, and it will likely be over as quickly as the New Kids on the Block reunion.

OK, let’s say the drinking age lowers from 21 to 18. Will there be less binge drinking? Maybe, but what if we have other problems?

What happens if 18 year olds start buying booze for their younger brothers and sisters the way upperclassmen are buying for freshmen and sophomores now? Do we lower the drinking age again?

If we go down that path, pretty soon our kids will be watching Sesame Street with a remote control in one hand and a Bud Light in the other.

What we need to do is simply teach our kids the dangers and responsibilities of alcohol the way we teach them the dangers and responsibilities of driving a car.

Teach it in our schools more, perhaps in the same semester as we teach sex ed and everything else our students should know as they make the transition from teenagers to adults.

That’s part one.

Part two is students then need to use common sense and permanently store the rights and wrongs of alcohol in their brains just as they have the rights and wrongs of everything else they’ve learned about life up to this point.

Alcohol is a serious problem in our colleges and universities. But we need to find a solution that gets to the roots of the problem, not one that has the potential to make the problem even bigger.

Increasing alcohol awareness should be as easy as learning the ABCs and 123s. Even Elmo probably knows that.