Girls Gone Wild

May 25, 2009 9:53 PM

Top Six Ways To Kill Piper. Apparently unaware of how controversial and high-profile cyber-bullying has become, the possibility of consequences, regardless of age, and a strong local preference against lists of arbitrary length, middle school girls make instructional video about how to kill classmate. No charges are filed. (via Huffington Post)
posted by ActingTheGoat (60 comments total)

I'm against this.
posted by mazola at 10:06 PM on May 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

This is clear and compelling evidence that our educational system is in freefall. The production values in that video were shit, and the methods of extermination were pedestrian and hackneyed.
posted by Crotalus at 10:08 PM on May 25, 2009 [22 favorites]

Nor should they be. All of these "cyber-bullying" stories make it seem like people don't remember what it's like to be a kid. God only knows how many of these sorts of fantasies my friends and I acted out in middle school - the only differences were that:

1) These kids have easy access to a global audience
2) Most of the ones my friends and I came up with were about our teachers (which would presumably be even worse)

Normal childhood behavior that parents have always averted their eyes towards + Internet = this.
posted by Ryvar at 10:10 PM on May 25, 2009 [6 favorites]

Some times I think it would be easier to grow up nerdy today than it was back when I was a kid. So many ways for a brainy kid to connect with other brainy kids. So many outlets for a busy mind. But then I hear about shit like this, and I think about the assholes I went to school with .... and I realize all the new ways kids have to make the "unpopular" ones feel like shit. And it's all on the internet for everyone to see, for all of eternity.

It will never be a good time to be a nerd. It will never be hip to be square.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:11 PM on May 25, 2009 [4 favorites]

Wait, you mean their lives weren't completely crushed, their families financially ruined fighting a hopeless court battle, their prospects of ever getting gainful employment ruined, and left with nothing but a choice of substance abuse or suicide?

We're leaving the discipline of children up to educators now? Where's the school board lynch mob? The rabid, careerist DA? The sniveling, just-following-orders administrators?

WHAT HAVE YOU BECOME, AMERICA?
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:14 PM on May 25, 2009 [12 favorites]

The video is pretty awful, but the thing is...this sort of thing has always happened, and will continue to happen, as long as there are 11 year-old kids who a) dislike each other and b) do not fully understand the implications of death threats and exhortations to suicide (which is most 11 year-olds). The only difference between this video and the sort of bullying that went on when I was in public school is the fact that it can be widely disseminated on the internet, both for the classmates of the children in question (which does make it more serious; if the target of the bullying knows a lot of people are aware of the mockery, its impact is intensified) and everyone on the internet who will see this, wring their hands and wonder What Is Wrong With Kids Today.

The girls who put the video together need to have it explained to them why what they did was wrong, but criminal charges would be absurd. Of course, if they don't learn their lesson, sterner measures would be called for.

Or, on preview, what Ryvar said.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:17 PM on May 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

2) Most of the ones my friends and I came up with were about our teachers (which would presumably be even worse)

Normal childhood behavior that parents have always averted their eyes towards + Internet = this.
posted by Ryvar at 10:10 PM on May 25 [+] [!]

I remember singing this in school and I'm only 23.

Joy to the world,
the teacher is dead,
we bar-becued her head,
the jan-itor is go-one,
we flushed him down the jo-ohn,
and round and round he goes,
and round and round he goes,
and ro-ound and ro-ound he goes!
posted by Pseudology at 10:18 PM on May 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

Sugar, spice, everything nice. At least, that's what they keep tellin' us.
posted by adipocere at 10:19 PM on May 25, 2009

Pseudology: The Burning of the School

They way I learned it wasn't quite covered in the (exhaustive) variants in that article, though, so here it is:
(to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic)

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher and we've broken every rule
We massacred the office and we killed the principal
His crotch we're marching on!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I hid behind the door with a loaded .44
and my teacher ain't teachin' no more!
posted by Ryvar at 10:37 PM on May 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Hid behind her door
With a loaded .44
She ain't gonna teach no more

Glory, glory to the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher
We have broken every rule
We have marched into the office
And have hung the principal
Our truth goes marching on...

(Second grade, 1974)
posted by maxwelton at 10:37 PM on May 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Jesus, Ryvar.
posted by maxwelton at 10:37 PM on May 25, 2009 [1 favorite]

I did stick figure violence at that age, albeit without naming the victim. And because it was 1986 the best animation technology I had was making a flipbook.

The only difference between this video and the sort of bullying that went on when I was in public school is the fact that it can be widely disseminated on the internet

Was that pre- or post-Columbine, though? In my case the internet is not the only difference.
posted by XMLicious at 10:39 PM on May 25, 2009

“We just don’t believe it was done with any malice or hate,” [the sheriff] said, adding that the girls called the victim’s mother crying and upset after the incident.

I don't think this sheriff has actually spoken to any girls, ever.
posted by bettafish at 10:43 PM on May 25, 2009 [11 favorites]

Some other classics:

(to the tune of On Top of Spaghetti)

On top of the schoolhouse
All covered with blood
I shot my poor teacher
With a .44 slug

I went to her funeral,
I went to her grave.
Some people threw flowers,
I threw a grenade.

It blew up the city.
It blew up the town.
It blew my poor teacher
Right out of the ground.

Now it seems my poor teacher,
Was not quite dead.
So I took a machete,
And chopped off her head.

(to the tune of the Marines' Hymn)

From the halls of Montezuma
To the Shores of PTA
We will fight our teacher's battles
With spitballs and with clay.
First to fight for longer recess,
And to keep our desks a mess (echo: a mess!)
We are proud to claim the title
Of the teacher's little pests.
posted by Ryvar at 10:44 PM on May 25, 2009 [4 favorites]

Mario Paint was the preferred format for our stick-figure snuff films. We kind of switched back and forth between splattering KKK guys and offing each other in imaginative ways. I remember a particularly good one where the victim rode this rollercoaster into this sideways guillotine blade. Good times.
posted by EatTheWeak at 10:45 PM on May 25, 2009

I wrote extremely violent tales in Grade 7, circa 1972, mostly concerning people getting shot and bleeding to death. I got very high marks. I never had to speak to a counselor. It never occurred to me to actually hurt anybody ... except perhaps my little brother.
posted by philip-random at 10:46 PM on May 25, 2009

Call CAA! We've got some young talent on our hands!
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 10:52 PM on May 25, 2009

A few years ago I was approached in a bar by two men who knew my name. They asked me if I remembered them and I drew a blank until they reminded me: they were two people I had bullied in middle school.

See, I was a bully back then. I was an angry fat kid who was convinced I was smarter than everyone and didn't get the recognition I deserved and so I took it out on those even worse than me. In the grand scheme of things, I was a small-time bully, but for these two, however, I was a petty tyrant.

And here they were, 20 years later. There was a weird triumphalism about the whole thing, not just that they had found me but there was an intense desire to see what had happened to me; how I had gotten my comeuppance.

There's a real belief that bullies end up as auto-mechanics or some generic undifferentiated blue-collar wife-beater figure, a stereotype that obscures quite a bit and reflects an odd understanding of class and gender-motivated violence. I was a little embarrassed to disabuse them of that notion. My parents had not liked the person I was becoming at that age and they had the resources to send me to a private school, a particularly progressive one. The new environment helped me immensely; I became far more compassionate and it laid the groundwork for an ability to identify with the subordinated. I went to an excellent college and was finishing at an extremely prestigious law school at the time. Furthermore, I was with an attractive woman and while she really was just a friend, they didn't believe me at all on that point (which was weird). They had grown up to be interesting people, had remained friends long after I left that school and were now roommates. They were doing just fine for themselves, but clearly felt like the roles should have been reversed. I enjoyed getting to know them a bit, but it was clearly not a shared feeling.

There was an obvious and awkward desire to have some cinematic moment where the tables were finally turned. Instead, there was just a difficult realization that those who wrong you may eventually do ok for themselves and that any closure must come from within and not a sense that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards revenge via humiliation. I continue to feel some remorse when I think of those days and I wish I hadn't done what I did. Bullying is reflective of so much that is wrong with our society; millions of children seeking for something to make them feel meaningful, longing for attention, control, anything. When I read posts like The Not Rape Epidemic I often feel the problems are linked. That young people are so desperate for something that's denied to them and have so few opportunities to define themselves that they'd do incredibly destructive things - and not in a vacuum, but will do so in ways that define a social landscape and subtly coerce others as well.

There's so much wrong with what's happening to Piper. Any pat explanations that try to make this seem easy are going to lead to terrible policy proposals. We can joke that we were all bullies or bullied, but some kids really have it terrible. I was on the wrong end of that transaction for years and Piper has it now. Any hope that she'll win out in the end and that we just need to give her time to triumph is probably insufficient. I'm not sure we have technical means by which to address what is a social problem, but we already have anti-bullying and civil rights laws. Danielle Citron at the University of Maryland has an interesting piece on Cyber Civil Rights that is a good way for us who care deeply about the Internet to think about these issues. But until then, be nice to a middle-school kid. Make them feel so valuable that they don't need to treat Piper like this and make the victims of bullying feel even better.
posted by allen.spaulding at 10:53 PM on May 25, 2009 [39 favorites]

Was that pre- or post-Columbine, though? In my case the internet is not the only difference.

I considered pointing that out as a difference, but decided that I want to think better of other people than that, so I didn't. But yeah, pre-Columbine in my case as well.

It's funny, now, but my very first open-ended writing assignment in 9th grade English resulted in a two-page power fantasy about a kid in a black trenchcoat blowing up his school.

In my junior year about ten of my friends and I openly discussed how we'd stage a school shooting/massacre, and we did so in the middle of the school library when it was packed with other students - I'm fairly certain some teachers overheard.

For reference so nobody thinks this was at a podunk school, the high school in question had 1700 students and was consistently New York State's top-performing high school. Two years after that, and just one year after I graduated was when Columbine happened.
posted by Ryvar at 10:54 PM on May 25, 2009

You know, it would be interesting to track these violent ... nursery rhymes? filks? ... across the nation, because back in the early nineties I was singing the exact same songs as Ryvar and maxwelton. This was in upstate New York.
posted by bettafish at 11:11 PM on May 25, 2009

Bettafish: my middle school years were also the early 90s, and also in upstate New York.

Hmmm.
posted by Ryvar at 11:12 PM on May 25, 2009

Fixating on that sort of violent musical fantasy was a pretty easy way to not be my friend when I was little. I blame a lot of my elementary-school alienation on behavior like this -- I remember feeling this bitter sense of disappointment that people couldn't just be civil.
posted by lumensimus at 11:21 PM on May 25, 2009

So, does this now mean as Piper grows up and people (potential new buds, bf's, bff's, employers) google her they might find this gem of a story from her past? Because I remember back in the old days, switching schools meant you had a shot at reinventing yourself.

Hopefully she has a different last name from her mom.
posted by Salmonberry at 11:54 PM on May 25, 2009

I bet they didn't put any thought into how best to dispose of the corpse.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:17 AM on May 26, 2009 [2 favorites]

Harry Roberts is our friend,
He kills coppers.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:22 AM on May 26, 2009

You know, it would be interesting to track these violent ... nursery rhymes? filks? ... across the nation, because back in the early nineties I was singing the exact same songs as Ryvar and maxwelton. This was in upstate New York.


Not just the US - I've heard two of them sung at my school in New Zealand (late 70s/early 80s). [The Battle Hymn of the Republic and On Top Of Spaghetti].
posted by Infinite Jest at 12:24 AM on May 26, 2009

Only question now is how to get rid of Phoebe, Prue, and Paige.
posted by knave at 12:48 AM on May 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

The only reason any of you think this is any good is nostalgia. Any adult watching this for the first time would just turn this boring shit off. I'm off to watch Éloge de l'amour with the sound turned down and Polish subtitles.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 1:31 AM on May 26, 2009

I learned them in New London county, Connecticut (probably from my older brother) in the early '70s. But I suspect they're fairly universal, eh?
posted by maxwelton at 3:40 AM on May 26, 2009

New York, 1950 or so:
Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
So I bopped her on the bean
With a rotten tangerine
And she ain't been to school no more.

and 'On Top of Spaghetti' was composed by Tom Glazer, 1963.
But it sure has the true 'kid' feel.

and lest we forget:
...sweet land of liver tree.
and
...through the night, with a light, from a bulb.
posted by hexatron at 4:47 AM on May 26, 2009

I sang Joy to the world and On top of the schoolhouse, early '90s, Newfoundland. I can't help feeling as if we had one to the tune of Oh Canada, but I can't remember it.
posted by Lemurrhea at 4:48 AM on May 26, 2009

Heh, I made a Hypercard stack about walking into my middle school and dispatching my least favorite teachers in increasingly complex ways. The woodshop teacher's death was actually pretty vanilla, given the availability of tools to work with. The difference was that his animated death played on the rumor that he had an affair with our computer lab teacher, and, hey, that's not wood glue dried on the table!
posted by SpiffyRob at 4:51 AM on May 26, 2009

I don't understand why everybody assumes that Piper is the one being bullied. Couldn't it just as easily be that Piper is the bully, and these six girls made a fantasy video of themselves offing the schoolyard tyrant? Not that that makes it excusable, but it might change the perspective a little.
posted by billysumday at 5:15 AM on May 26, 2009 [2 favorites]

Sounds like more reason to not allow kids unfettered access to the internet.
posted by MrBobaFett at 5:20 AM on May 26, 2009

billysumday: that's exactly the thought I had while watching this. Not to cast aspersions based on, like, a six second soundbite, but once Piper was on screen, I immediately thought, "oh, that's that this is." I can't really say why, even, but I'm just betting that Piper is the actual bully here.

In any case, the six-year-old being carted off to the jail because she threw a tantrum in class is the most horrific thing outlined in this post.

(Also, nice use of the Heathers tag)
posted by Navelgazer at 5:32 AM on May 26, 2009 [2 favorites]

Deck the halls with gasoline!
Fa-la-la-la-laaa, la-la-la-la!

Light a match and watch it gleam!
Fa-la-la-la-laaa, la-la-la-la!

Watch the schoolhouse burn to ashes!
Fa-la-la, Fa-la-la, Fa-La-La!

Aren't you glad you play with matches?
Fa-La-La-La-Laaa, La-La-La-La!!!

I think we had that one down pat by 3rd grade.
posted by spirit72 at 5:36 AM on May 26, 2009

I continue to feel some remorse when I think of those days and I wish I hadn't done what I did.
-- allen.spaulding

If you're interested in being relieved of the remorse, doing something, in the current world, may help with that feeling. Teach, for instance. Life coach. Bully-watch. Place yourself in life so that the current iteration of the two kids you bullied are protected, taught to defend themselves, or shown how to cope.
posted by krilli at 5:40 AM on May 26, 2009

Not violent, just morbid:

Ta Ra Ra BOOM Dee Ay!
We have no school today!
Our teacher passed away!
She died of tooth decay!
We threw her in the bay!
She sacred the fish away!
She's never coming out!
She smells like sauerkraut!

I heard that on A Prairie Home Companion.

Also, when I was verifying the lyrics, I found them on this page, which collected variations of grisly school parody songs.
posted by bibliowench at 6:16 AM on May 26, 2009

"Scared the fish away"
posted by bibliowench at 6:19 AM on May 26, 2009

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I hid behind the door with a loaded .44
and my teacher ain't teachin' no more!

When I was in second grade, we were singing Battle Hymn of the Republic as part of a historical school play. I recall the teacher scolding us for not singing the correct lyrics.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:38 AM on May 26, 2009

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes

School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks
posted by Sailormom at 6:42 AM on May 26, 2009

And it's all on the internet for everyone to see, for all of eternity. It will never be a good time to be a nerd.

Well, today's jocks have their own hotchickswithdouchebags.com variety of eternal internet fame to look forward to. And imagine how jobhunting will be for all the goth/punks in the future when viewed against their online legacy of artful arm cuttings.

Things are tough all over.
posted by rokusan at 7:22 AM on May 26, 2009

Sailormom went to school with Alice Freaking Cooper!
posted by rokusan at 7:22 AM on May 26, 2009

Teach, for instance. Life coach. Bully-watch.

I stubbornly refuse to recognize at least two of those three things as verbs.
posted by rokusan at 7:24 AM on May 26, 2009

Can't help but think that if the video had been made by middle school boys, the outcome would have been different.
posted by bitmage at 8:12 AM on May 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

I think the girls who posted the video should have their names released. If Piper's name is going to be splashed across the internet for the rest of her life, then the girls who caused the shitstorm should also be publicly identified. Seems only fair.
posted by dejah420 at 8:43 AM on May 26, 2009 [2 favorites]

Ahh, this reminds me of the time in second grade I kissed the girl I had a crush on. The room had emptied out for recess, and we were the last two kids remaining. It was a sweet moment. This FPP is another one of those childhood moments, but not as fun to relive 30 years later when it has no real impact on your life.
posted by not_on_display at 9:04 AM on May 26, 2009

I get more reasons every day to not have children.

Reason 234543: Most teenage girls are monsters. If your own isn't one, in all probability, someone else is being a monster to her.
posted by kldickson at 9:34 AM on May 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

I think the girls who posted the video should have their names released. If Piper's name is going to be splashed across the internet for the rest of her life, then the girls who caused the shitstorm should also be publicly identified. Seems only fair.

An eye for an eye... something something something...

Let's not fuck up more lives in the name of morality. Especially those of children.
posted by Alex404 at 9:40 AM on May 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

Kadin2048: We're leaving the discipline of children up to educators now? Where's the school board lynch mob? The rabid, careerist DA? The sniveling, just-following-orders administrators?

I might be wrong on this, but the way you've phrased (and emphasized) this comment leads me to believe you think it should be the educators to be the primary disciplinarians. I think you skipped parents.

Navelgazer: I can't really say why, even, but I'm just betting that Piper is the actual bully here.

billysumday: Couldn't it just as easily be that Piper is the bully, and these six girls made a fantasy video of themselves offing the schoolyard tyrant?

Jesus fucking Christ. Why is it that, whenever the victim of an attack (mental, emotional, or physical) is female, there is an almost instantaneous jump to blame the victim? Jesus fucking Christ. You don't know the details, but from your gut feelings, or one clip of a video, you're ready to state that the girls who posted the video were the poor innocent victims. If they were being bullied, they wouldn't post a video to YouTube that would inescapably incite further, and likely worse, bullying.

The Card Cheat: criminal charges would be absurd. Of course, if they don't learn their lesson, sterner measures would be called for.

You know how I bet they'd "learn their lesson"? Criminal charges. Don't convict, drop the charges, expunge the record, whatever, but after a taste of what could happen, they wouldn't pull anymore of that bullshit, for damn sure.

And "sterner measures" should only come if they don't learn their lesson? In other words, wait for them to do something worse before any action is taken. Sounds good to me.
posted by tzikeh at 9:49 AM on May 26, 2009

Forgot to add: comparing this incident to the songs people are posting is ridiculous. This was a targeted attack on a specific person, not a song all the kids sing about nobody.
posted by tzikeh at 9:55 AM on May 26, 2009

So, does this now mean as Piper grows up and people (potential new buds, bf's, bff's, employers) google her they might find this gem of a story from her past? Because I remember back in the old days, switching schools meant you had a shot at reinventing yourself.

My fervent prayer is that someday Piper will grow to be a healthy, together woman who will find this video hilarious and who will enjoy laughing about it with anyone who finds it.

I mean, if you met someone and then found out some kids had made a snuff film about her in middle school, wouldn't you think she was more awesome rather than less?
posted by straight at 9:55 AM on May 26, 2009

Florida, in elementary school in the seventies:

Glory, glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Shot her in the butt
With a rotten coconut
And there ain't no school no more.

We obviously did not have the easy access to firearms you New Yorkers did.
posted by misha at 10:38 AM on May 26, 2009

Suburban Detroit, early 1970s. We sang the "Battle Hymn" song, as well as these two:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Throw your teacher overboard
And listen to her scream.
(Aaaaaaarrgh!)

(to the tune of Frere Jacques):
Marijuana, marijuana
LSD, LSD.
Scientists make it, teachers take it
Why can't we? Why can't we?

Funny thing was, we sang these loudly on the school bus during field trips, and the teacher(s) never stopped us or said anything; often times they just laughed.
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:09 AM on May 26, 2009

allen.spaulding : There's a real belief that bullies end up as auto-mechanics or some generic undifferentiated blue-collar wife-beater figure... Instead, there was just a difficult realization that those who wrong you may eventually do ok for themselves and that any closure must come from within and not a sense that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards revenge via humiliation.

Very well said. Though the cinematic ending happens as well; one of the primary bullies from my high-school ended up in poor circumstances; at my 10 year reunion I found out that he had stacked up about 4 DUIs in one year and had actually crashed into someone and hurt them pretty badly. He was in prision at the time of reunion.

This path surprised no one.

You know, it would be interesting to track these violent ... nursery rhymes?

In my school we used the version maxwelton quoted above. This would have been in Wisconsin in the early '80s.
posted by quin at 2:39 PM on May 26, 2009

Born dead, our teacher was born dead
Three fingers and no head
Our teacher was born dead
posted by InfidelZombie at 3:08 PM on May 26, 2009

tzikeh: Seriously? I watched the clip provided thinking this was horrible, and then got a gut feeling that we weren't getting the whole story, which, of course, we weren't. I'm not saying that the girls who did this are blameless or in any way in the right, but we've gotten one side of this and no other.

For instance, I'd like to know how we are so sure that this video was made by six particular girls. Since we don't know their names (and I agree that they shouldn't be made public, for obvious reasons) I'd like to at least know where we got the information that they, and all of them, were responsible.

I'd also feel better about passing judgment on this if I knew what made them think this was in any way appropriate. That wouldn't, of course, make it so, but it would at least go a long way towards understanding what happened here.

As it stands, all we know is that somebody made a stupid, vicious video about Piper, and then Piper took it to the national newsmedia level when the school district didn't punish that alleged somebody enough in her eyes. Criminal charges are way over the line for what happened here (even if that were the appropriate legal remedy in this situation, which it isn't. Juvenile cases are civil unless the crime is so heinous and the child is old enough for the court to determine they should be tried as an adult. Non-physical harassment by 11-year-olds doesn't fit the bill.)

I want to know the rest of the story, is all, and I know I won't, and shouldn't, get it, because while Piper chose to face the world with this, which very well might have been brave of her, the girls involved did not, and we have protections for children in incidents such as this.

But assuming that this impulse is the same as blaming any female victim is jumping to some pretty far-off conclusions, and assuming that Piper's side of the story is all we need to know is doing the same.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:06 PM on May 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

tzikeh: "I might be wrong on this, but the way you've phrased (and emphasized) this comment leads me to believe you think it should be the educators to be the primary disciplinarians. I think you skipped parents."

Good point. However, I think that if the bullying extended into school hours or affected the student in question at school (which it almost certainly would), then it starts to fall under the purview of teachers and other school staff to punish.

I'm not really in favor of allowing teachers to dole out punishment in school for things that occur outside of class, except when those transgressions have an effect in some way inside the classroom or school. Putting a nasty video up on the Internet, almost certainly so that other kids at school could see it, strikes me as casting enough of a shadow over school time to be worthy of a teacher's attention.

The primary disciplinarians should always be parents, but I'm not naïve enough to think that parents will always do the right thing. There are a lot of parents of bullies who think that their kids are just wonderful little darlings to leave it completely up to them.

Plus, there's a certain point where a kid's behavior is simply so bad — and I'm not saying it's approached that level here; I'm speaking generally — where it's inherently a condemnation of their parents' discipline strategy. Educators should always give parents first crack at a transgressive student, but when the parents can't do their job it falls to them next, because after them it's going to be law enforcement and the prison system.

What I was lambasting in my earlier post was a tendency I've seen a lot in recent years to bypass not only parents, but teachers as well, and skip directly to the "law enforcement and prison system" part, even for stupid adolescent behavior.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:44 PM on May 26, 2009

rokusan: Well, today's jocks have their own hotchickswithdouchebags.com variety of eternal internet fame to look forward to. And imagine how jobhunting will be for all the goth/punks in the future when viewed against their online legacy of artful arm cuttings. Things are tough all over.

Honestly? I seriously doubt it. Look around you at your workplace. How many visible piercings do you see? How many tattoos? When I was a teen in the 90s, they were still warning you of the job consequences of that stuff. The world changed & "normal" was redefined. I don't even blink when I see eyebrow piercings or fluorescent blue hair in the public service and I'm sure I've seen visible sleeve tats on cops.

Online shenanigans, barring the blatantly illegal, will cease to matter because as time passes EVERYONE'S skeletons will be hanging out on the online front porch. And it'll happen in 10-15 years, max.

kldickson: Reason 234543: Most teenage girls are monsters. If your own isn't one, in all probability, someone else is being a monster to her.

Or, more likely, you're blinded by the light of her halo (like most parents).
posted by Decimask at 7:03 PM on May 26, 2009

Decimask, you've just provided me another reason: because I don't want to become a delusional idiot. :D
posted by kldickson at 10:38 AM on May 29, 2009