Don't Read This

Four teenage boys in Florida are on trial for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old classmate. Over the course of two months, they violently sodomized the boy multiple times with a broomstick and a hockey stick. All this in the school’s locker room.

One of the many reasons this will keep me up tonight is that several other students either saw the rapes firsthand, or heard the victim’s screams down the hallways of the school. (Plus in high school, news like that travels fast.)

And for two months, no one spoke up! Not one person. Eventually the victim came forward, after a fight with one of the perpetrators. Kid had to save himself.

How does shit like this happen?!

My guess is that there’s two possible scenarios. One, someone did notify an adult, and they were ignored—and the school is doing the best job it can to cover that up. Two, it could be that cnn.com got it right, and the whole damn school just kept their mouths shut.

The adults covering their asses, I don’t agree with, but can understand. But the kids—why wouldn’t the kids stand up for one of their own?

Some will say it’s because there’s too much hardcore porn on the internet, corrupting the young minds and whatnot. Others will point to the violence in video games—maybe that’s what’s desensitizing the babies these days. Still others will blame it on the Goose; they’ll say it’s because of all the novel ways to get really, really high without getting caught.

Personally, I disagree with all of em.

Because really, I think shit like this happens all the time. Yea, I said it: regularly. People just don’t really talk about it much. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’ll make news--like those kids in Texas who raped their classmate with a patio umbrella a few years back—but when it does, it tends to fizzle fast.

And it’s not because we don’t like violence. Clearly, we love it. We’ve got an obsession with it…everybody knows that, so it aint that at all.

It’s really because, deep down, we’d do anything not to have to see ourselves that way.

See, it’s one thing when we observe blood and guts and gore on a screen—movie, tv, computer, what have you. But it’s a whole other ball of wax when it’s sitting right in front of us—unadulterated, with no special effects and no happy ending.

Why? Because none of us ever really wanna look too closely into the mirror. We want to remember the times when we do good; we love to talk about the times when “basic human decency” prevails, when the good guy gets the girl and everyone goes home happy. But, more often than we’d like to admit, the human animal fails miserably in the ethical / moral department. And really, at the end of the day: who the hell wants to sit around thinking about that?

So I’m sorry folks, but in this story, everybody loses. Due to the extreme nature of the crime, all those crazy ass kids are being tried as adults. If convicted of all charges, they could face up to 120 years in prison…where they’ll likely be subjected to the same torment they dished out to that hapless kid in the locker room.

But is that justice? Does that bring us any sense of peace or closure?

Or is this one of those stories that would ever make it to Hollywood? One of those real-life stories? The kind where nobody wins, and there sure as hell isn’t a happy ending.

You tell me.