Life's Pleasures Quote by Donna Shalala

Shalala’s line lands like a diagnosis disguised as a scold. She’s not moralizing about youth so much as pointing a finger at the adults who built the menu of “fun” and then act surprised when the specials are booze and chaos. The first move is deliberate: “our young people” wraps the subject in collective responsibility. This isn’t “those kids” rhetoric; it’s ownership. Then she pivots to the mechanics of desire: not delinquency, but “parties,” “dance,” “a scene” - the basic human need to belong somewhere loud, social, and affirming.

The sharpest subtext is structural. By saying “no institutions are providing them with alternatives,” she implies a vacuum created by policy, budgeting, and civic imagination. Institutions here isn’t just government; it’s schools, parks departments, community centers, universities, faith groups - the whole infrastructure that used to organize adolescence and early adulthood into supervised, affordable third places. If that scaffolding collapses, the marketplace fills in, and alcohol becomes the easiest social technology available: cheap confidence, instant ritual, a ready-made “center.”

Contextually, this reads like late-20th/early-21st-century public health pragmatism: harm reduction by design, not sermon. She’s arguing that prevention isn’t only about cracking down; it’s about offering substitutes that compete on pleasure. The line works because it shifts the conversation from individual blame to environmental cues - a culture where we underwrite stadiums and policing, then cheap out on the everyday spaces that make reckless nightlife feel optional rather than inevitable.