Teenagers are going to drink alcohol.

It’s a rite of passage.

Get over it.

Right?

Plenty of our readers think so, including one who said Friday, “Give me a break. Kids will be kids, let them have some fun. There’s been teenage pit parties since there’s been high schools.”

That’s true. There have also been dead teenagers since there have been pit parties.

Drinking and dying are rites of passage. Always have been and always will be.

Right?

It certainly seems so, given the attitude of too many adults that underage drinking is OK.

“Kids will be kids! It’s never been any different and never will be. Some get caught, some don’t. Leave them alone, they’re growing up,” according to one of our readers.

Problem is, some of them don’t grow up because they drink and get behind the wheel, or get in a car with others, blending a deadly mix of driver inexperience and alcohol.

It’s simple good fortune that none of the Mountain Valley High School students who attended Tuesday night’s “pit” party died, since dozens of them drove off before police were called to Bunker Pond in Roxbury. Of those still at the party when police arrived, 25 teens were charged with underage drinking, including the captain of the school’s football team.

Trooper Jason Wing said that some of the parents he spoke with didn’t see any problem with the teens drinking because they weren’t driving. In what other circumstance would any parent suggest it’s OK for their child to commit a crime as long as the child didn’t get hurt or didn’t hurt someone else?

It’s a curious attitude of tolerance for illegal behavior, and a curious abdication of parental responsibility repeated over generations.

In 1979, when the drinking age was 18, David Blanchard – who was 18 at the time – was driving drunk and lost control of his car, killing Bradley Boyce, Susan Osgood, Felicia Moffitt, Gerald Swan and Eric Wentworth, all from the Bethel area. Although legally entitled to drink, he was not entitled to kill.

In 2006, Michael Cournoyer, 20, was driving drunk when he lost control of his car in Poland, killing Steven Walton, Laura Caron, Matthew Manley, Robert Bruce, Jacob Roy and himself. Cournoyer was neither legally entitled to drink or drive, and was operating with a suspended license.

In these cases, and too many others over the years, the drivers are clearly to blame, but others are, too, because we live in a society that winks and nods at teen drinking as a rite of passage. It is too often a passage to death.

“For those who want to blow this off as teenagers being teenagers, why don’t you go talk to the cops, EMS providers, doctors and nurses who have had to deal with the outcome of such parties, had to make the phone calls to the parents to come identify their child in the morgue, who have to deal with the grief-stricken parents who just can’t believe their child would have done such a thing? Or, better yet, why not volunteer to make such calls yourself? I guarantee you will walk away with a whole different attitude on teenage drinking,” offers a reader.

Spoken like someone who has suffered the kind of heartache that no parent deserves.

By winking now, parents could be sobbing later.