A severe woman, dressed in black, sits at an Underwood typewriter. Her dark eyes glitter and there are beads of perspiration on her upper lip. There is a rising color in her neck and face. Her respiration is quick and shallow as she pecks away with an arrhythmic staccato.
She writing a sex scene in a romance novel, right Spot?
Good guess, grasshopper, but wide of the mark. It's Katie, writing today about the just but sorry fate of a group of Eden Prairie high school students who were featured drinking on a Facebook page:
We used to think of Eden Prairie as a quiet corner of suburbia, aspiring to be what its name implies: An idyllic refuge from the commotion of big-city life. Sure, its tangled freeways can be maddening to outsiders, but we've still viewed it as a tranquil place to live, work and get an education. Until last week.
That's when Eden Prairie High School administrators called a long line of students to the office to discuss compromising photos that had shown up on Facebook.com. Some of the photos appeared to show the students at boozy, underage drinking parties. Forty-two students were interviewed and 13 were disciplined, receiving suspensions from sports and other activities.
Facebook has, boys and girls, ripped the Bedford Falls face off of the Eden Prairie Potterville. And Katie couldn't be happier.
Some of the kids railed about the invasion of privacy and ruined scholarship chances; parents sighed that teen-age drinking was inevitable.
Katie is having none of it. You see, Katie is a empty nester, and her chance to deliver this lecture to even a mythical child must have been really cathartic:
You broke the law, and some of you broke your word. As an athlete, you signed a pledge not to drink or possess alcohol, and to be 'fully responsible' for your actions and their consequences. What is there about this you don't understand?
If you think breaking the law and breaking your promise have no consequences, well, you've learned something.
Don't give me the 'everyone does it' line. That never worked with my mom, and it won't work with the Highway Patrol.
And drop the privacy-rights stuff. There's a camera in every cell phone these days. If you do what is right and don't drink illegally, you'll have nothing to fear from other people's cameras.
Yes, you're 17 years old now, but there's a lot you don't know. The stakes here are higher than losing two weeks with the lacrosse team.
Imagine what would happen to your privacy and life prospects after you've driven off the road, paralyzed yourself or killed a friend. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions, and makes it easier to discard your principles. It can lead you to abuse someone else, or become abused yourself. The consequences could transform your life.
Oh, and about your concern that the school's penalty was too harsh. You'll soon think of that as a Hawaiian vacation compared with going without car keys until the last snow melts this spring in Eden Prairie.
Spot's favorite sentence is "Alcohol lowers your inhibitions, and makes it easier to discard your principles."
You mean like deciding to rob a gas station or burn down a school on the spur of the moment?
No grasshopper. Spot thinks that Katie had something else in mind.
Anyway, Katie just seems a little, well, cheerful, about meeting out punishment, don't you think? Irresponsible use of alcohol is a societal problem that goes far beyond young people drinking before they hit 21, and it is illegal until you get there, boys and girls. But Katie is just having too much fun for Spot's taste.
There's one other thing that bothers Spot. It is this:
And drop the privacy-rights stuff. There's a camera in every cell phone these days. If you do what is right and don't drink illegally, you'll have nothing to fear from other people's cameras.
Here, Katie embraces the National Surveillance State with open arms. "If you do what is right" you don't have to be worried about the National Surveillance State. Remember, someone might be watching; someone probably is watching, and maybe it isn't only your friends! It's important to Katie that you be afraid, very afraid, boys and girls.
Update: Katie hasn't had so much fun since she wrote about spanking.
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