Wednesday, August 23, 2006
With hordes of ignorant youngsters rekindling their compulsory educations this week, my commute time magically increased five minutes, thanks to school zones and overzealous crossing guards.
For some reason, the state legislature thinks that the slower cars move, the less damage they'll do to children, ignoring the frustration caused to thousands of motorists every day and blind to the fact that even at twenty-five miles per hour, most kids would get pretty messed up in a collision. Consider the complete opposite. If cars were allowed to fly through school zones at ninety miles per hour, it would only take one splattered kid on the evening news to scare them all straight. They'd never forget to look both ways again, and it would only cost one child's life.
Despite school zones, the occasional kid gets mowed down anyway, but this isn't because children are stupid. When compared to teens, they look pretty smart sometimes. I have a theory that every teenager is stupid. When I was a teen, I was stupid. When you were a teen, you were stupid. When Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking were teens, they were stupid too, but Stephen also wore diapers and needed a robot to talk for him.
Contrast this with kids. I know I wasn't a stupid kid. Proof? When the jolly lunch ladies would serve chicken nuggets in the cafeteria every Wednesday, I was the only child in the school who didn't call them "Chicken McNuggets," probably because I wasn't raised on fast-food meals and wild adventures in Ronald's Playland. Kids obviously aren't aware of registered trademarks, but even a blind person could tell the difference between Ronald's flash-fried McNuggets and the school's oven-baked ones, not to mention the crumbly Shake n' Bake stuff coating them.
I'm sure school lunch has evolved since I last ate it. Tater tots are now cool, thanks to Napolean Dynamite, and ketchup is no longer classified as a vegetable, now that Reagan is dead. But I'd bet you my milk money that kids are still calling the main course of Wednesday's lunch "Chicken McNuggets," and that thousands of drivers will be late to work for the next nine months.
For some reason, the state legislature thinks that the slower cars move, the less damage they'll do to children, ignoring the frustration caused to thousands of motorists every day and blind to the fact that even at twenty-five miles per hour, most kids would get pretty messed up in a collision. Consider the complete opposite. If cars were allowed to fly through school zones at ninety miles per hour, it would only take one splattered kid on the evening news to scare them all straight. They'd never forget to look both ways again, and it would only cost one child's life.
Despite school zones, the occasional kid gets mowed down anyway, but this isn't because children are stupid. When compared to teens, they look pretty smart sometimes. I have a theory that every teenager is stupid. When I was a teen, I was stupid. When you were a teen, you were stupid. When Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking were teens, they were stupid too, but Stephen also wore diapers and needed a robot to talk for him.
Contrast this with kids. I know I wasn't a stupid kid. Proof? When the jolly lunch ladies would serve chicken nuggets in the cafeteria every Wednesday, I was the only child in the school who didn't call them "Chicken McNuggets," probably because I wasn't raised on fast-food meals and wild adventures in Ronald's Playland. Kids obviously aren't aware of registered trademarks, but even a blind person could tell the difference between Ronald's flash-fried McNuggets and the school's oven-baked ones, not to mention the crumbly Shake n' Bake stuff coating them.
I'm sure school lunch has evolved since I last ate it. Tater tots are now cool, thanks to Napolean Dynamite, and ketchup is no longer classified as a vegetable, now that Reagan is dead. But I'd bet you my milk money that kids are still calling the main course of Wednesday's lunch "Chicken McNuggets," and that thousands of drivers will be late to work for the next nine months.
# posted by RBW @ 11:26 AM 
