Suicide makes sense now...

Where I live, we have our local daily paper - The Clarion Ledger - or the Clarion Liar, if you are having a conversation with anyone of the conservative ilk. Out in Rankin County we have the Rankin County News - a weekly subscription paper. I have actually seen a story in this paper about a man arrested for boinking his pig. So as far as I'm concerned, this paper has my respect. An offshoot of this grand herald is another weekly rag that gets tossed into your driveway on Tuesday night - you don't even subscride to it. In fact you can't stop it! It is called the Weekly Reader and while I have never seen anything about pig-fuckings in it, it does have an occasional moment of mirth.

So there is a section in this beast called "Teen Voice". This is an ongoing list of Q&A that local teens send in anonymously. Every so often I have occasion to read this crap. I do so mostly because I am always in need of an excuse to mock and patronize the local youth. Or to ridicule their parents. Or both.

I need to stop doing this, though. While I really don't think that the youth of Rankin county could ever be thought of as a microcosm of any society (unless it happened to be a society of the spoiled children of ultra-christian, super conservative, middle-class parents) it does occasionally make me weep for the future.

For instance - last week's question was "Discuss your feelings about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath". Today, we were presented with 3 answers.

• I don't understand why the hurricane will cause bills to go up. It doesn't make any sense to me, but my parents are very worried. (from Brandon Middle School)

• It's hard to believe people are still talking about this. I mean, get over it. (from Anon. 15 yr old)

• My father's home office was in New Orleans, and he's had a lot of problems trying to get business done. He said that we're behind on bills, and this Christmas I can't get what I wanted. All because of a stupid storm. (from Pearl)

Huh? So these kids range from maybe 10 to 17. Probably 13 to 16. Anyway - when I am getting near retirement age, these kids will be running everything - or trying to, at least.

You can probably understand my concern, now.

Was I that big of an asshole at that age? It seems to me that my teenage years were one big quest for sex and good bags of dope. I certainly wasn't a civic volunteer or member of Greenpeace or any other worthwhile causes. But I also would never have been able to formulate a "lots of people killed and lives changed forever but so what get over it" statement even when I was ripped out of my mind.

Oh goddamn! The little fucker from Pearl isn't going to get what he wants for Christmas! Whatever shall we do???

Too bad the little asshole didn't ask for a hurricane to obliterate tens of thousands of homes and bring pain and suffering to hundreds of thousands of lives! Then he'd have a fantastic christmas!

Well, I'm wishing that his dad would have had a vasectomy back in the eighties! I guess my christmas will suck, too...