Knocked Up

It's amusing at least, the alarmist coverage of this week's big "keep 'em scared 'n' stupid" story. Could your kids be part of a covert pregnancy or suicide pact? Why yes, they could. They could also be doing drugs, setting fire to stray dogs, or memorizing Fifty Cent tracks. The world is an oyster when you're young and dumb.

But the article seems hesitant to make any necessary logical leaps here. Technology facilitates many of these little "pacts". Okay then, maybe parents need to monitor those toys a little better, or think twice about them in the first place. Amazingly, kids got along just fine without cell phones and MySpace up till about six years ago. (They also managed to have sex and get pregnant without them.)

Even worse is the "media images" assumption. Someone who patterns their major life decisions after the actions of famous, wealthy statistical anomalies has other issues anyway, among them being dumber than shit. But okay, even if you lend credence to this ridiculous notion, what then? If your kid really is that stupid, then shooting your teevee and making them read books more often is an option worth considering.

Because more dangerous than the whiff of risky sex or even gratuitous violence, what most teevee really imparts is that luck is the only sure way out, that other people are there to grease your climb to the top, whether your dream is making a fucking fool out of yourself for Simon Cowell's amusement, opening a suitacase that might have money in it, being in a bad musical based on a worse movie culled from an even crummier book, or just eating bugs and humping inanimate objects for the opportunity to swap venereal diseases with an internet whore. It's all good.

It makes sense that, in an environment where not only humans themselves but every conceivable aspect of their personalities and desires have been commodified, repurposed, and packaged, a bunch of mediocre students with mediocre aspirations from a dying town would do this. Blaming it on the latest Spears offspring absolves everyone involved, because while the media pretends to blame itself, it's not like they're gonna change a fuckin' thing.

This is an industry specially engineered and constantly tested and refined, to distract suckers into submission, to buy shit they don't really want with money they don't really have. Everywhere these girls will turn -- even if they go to college -- they will be somebody's customer for the rest of their lives. And all of those somebodies have vested interests in keeping the cash flow up.

That these girls chose to make a life-changing decision with peers that they probably won't recognize fifteen years down the road merely proves that youth is wasted on the young, and little more. It's good for whipping up the usual hysteria that teens are having Teh Sex, but guess what? They are. You did. I did. Of course they're going to.

The problem is not that they're bumping uglies, or even that they got knocked up, it's that they went into those things clearly unencumbered with even the basics of making those decisions. Parents, schools, media, themselves, whatever. All of those things are to blame, but only to the extent that no one will ever actually do anything about any of them.