Delinquents

I know I said I'm on strike, and I am, but the strike has lasted much longer than I thought it would, and there's been something on my mind for rather awhile that I wanted to discuss.

The tone of this blog is mostly lighthearted and often downright silly, but this is something serious that has been bothering me for months.

I work for a non-profit with children and adolescents in a wide variety of areas and ways, and one of the things I do is work with teens who have been sentenced to community service for various crimes, from fighting in school, to stealing bikes, to breaking and entering to assault. I fondly refer to them as My Delinquents.

Everyone can (probably) agree that breaking into people's homes, dealing and doing heroin and meth and etc, destroying others' property, and assaulting classmates are bad things. But it doesn't follow that the kids who do these things are bad kids. Not necessarily. In the last few months I've seen between 20 and 30 of these kids in and out of here. There crimes and their sentences have been extremely varied, and so have they.

The problem with this is that I can't say much about anything, but I can at least say that I have had boys and girls come through who were friendly, polite, sweet, hard working and seemingly responsible. Working with them I can have great conversations, and after a few days or a few weeks I still can't imagine what they could possibly have done to get themselves sentenced to as many as 100 hours. I've had a few favorites over the course of these months, kids I was actually sad to see leave even though I know it's probably better if I never see them again.

Example. I had a girl come in with 20 hours for getting into a fight in school. I really liked working with her. She was nice, liked to chat, did everything she was asked to do with no attitude, always smiling. Towards the end of her time with us, I asked her, baffled, what she could possibly have done to get in trouble. She had gotten into a fist fight with another student in school over something that student had said to her. I won't repeat it, but I agreed that the other student probably deserved a few punches in the face. However, actually doing it, especially in the middle of the cafeteria, was a POOR DECISION. She agreed with me.

She left, and even though I missed her happy presence, I was hoping to never see her around here again.

She came back last week with another 20 hours.

I had a boy awhile back with an insane number of hours. I still have no clue what he did, but all the clues point to it being something particularly bad. He too was a favorite, and definitely is missed. Fortunately though, I do really doubt he will be back. I hope I'm right.

This job really brings home the idea that a single bad decision can completely turn things around.
It's upsetting to watch these kids make these decisions that now put them in my care, and will possibly someday put them in jail. Or dead.
That's really all I have to say.

Writer Strike

Though today is Wednesday, I am not posting. I am not posting again until Rachael posts ONE of her overdue posts. Or any post.

Do Not Marry Justin Bieber

I hear the name Justin Bieber nearly every day. Either the little girl I babysit in the morning wants to play Justin Bieber trivia during the car ride to school, or the little girls at work are mooning shamelessly over his pictures on the internet, or his horrifyingly awful music is on the radio as I drive home at night. My kids own books filled with photos and the facts of his life, they wear t-shirts with giant Justin Bieber faces on the front, they make me watch Justin Bieber interviews at ridiculous hours like 6:30 a.m.

Justin Bieber's favorite sport is hockey. His favorite color is purple. He likes spaqhetti. He is 16 years old and has a girlfriend who my little girls insist is stupid because they found a picture of him kissing her. "HOW DARE HE!" they shriek in heartbroken agony every time one comes up on the internet. Yet despite this betrayal I continue to get handed drawings of little families labeled, "Me, My Husband Justin Bieber, and Our Child." When I told one 8 year old that perhaps this boy was a bit old for her, she gave me a disgusted look, rolled her eyes, and said dramatically, "Danielle, I would marry Justin Bieber even if he was as old as TWENTY ONE!"

That is dedication indeed, my little friend. I am sorry I mocked your impending romance.

Wait, no I'm not.

Because marrying Justin Bieber is a POOR DECISION. Have you heard the kid speak? I don't know about the rest of you, but being as in tune with this little fluffy blond boy as I am these days, I found the video now going around (and by found, I mean it appeared in the headlines on the MSN homepage) of an interview he did in Chicago where he did not know what the word "German" meant. It was repeated to him several times, and finally shown to him on a notecard. His interviewer did have a nice thick New Zealand accent, so I gave him th benefit of the doubt until he looked at the word on the notecard and responded, "German? We don't say that word in America."

This is who they all want to marry? My little girls who I am mentoring and educating and slowly but surely SMASHING all the "aint's" out of their vocabulary, they want to align themselves with that little banged creature? Throw all my teachings out the window? It hurts.

Let us take, for example, one of his recent songs. The main verse: "Shorty is an eenie meenie minie mo lover...shorty is an eenie meenie minie mo lover...shorty is an eenie meenie minie mo lover...eenie meenie minie mo catch a shorty by the toe..."

God help us all.

But let's go back to the German business. As horrified as I am by the footage of this interview, what horrifies me more is that though poor sad fluffy looking Justin Bieber (seriously, have you seen this kid's hair? I have. A lot. Every day. These girls probably have more than one shrine in its fluffy honor) is being mocked all over the internet as one more stupid child star that should have been in school all this time is that he is in fact REPRESENTATIVE of the average intelligence of 16 year olds that HAVE been in school all this time! I ought to know.

I do not doubt that 75% of my own former students would have reacted the same way given a similar question. We are talking about kids in a wealthy, top rated school system, classrooms filled with (supposedly) some of the brighter students the school had to offer. We are also talking about kids who were pretty sure Europe was a state in Canada, had never heard of Berlin or Buckingham Palace, and probably couldn't locate Australia on a globe.

If you are one of those former students who has somehow found this, don't worry sweetheart, you're part of the other 25%.

Point is, there are a lot of poor decisions being made in the world these days, only one of which is marrying small boys with girl voices and too much hair. The big one to me now is what we are teaching our children, because whatever it is, it's not working. Maybe their math skills are better. I can only hope. Because as far as I can tell these days, Justin Bieber is educating half of our youth, and Lady Gaga is educating the other half.

We are all more or less doomed.