re: #142 Mich-again

Very weird decade. The things that went on every day in middle school would probably make the National news today. We were all delinquents. Even the smart kids. When I tell young people some of the stories about the shenanigans we got into all the time, they just shake their head in disbelief.

Like getting high with the football coaches after games in 8th grade. Or throwing snowballs at cars after school every day in the winter. Or being gone from morning to night riding our bikes 20 miles from home in the Summer with the folks having no idea at all where we were. Or seeing who could rip off the most stuff from a store, with a winner take all for the prize. I could go on all day. We were horrible kids by todays standards. And that was at a Catholic school. The public school kids were even worse!

Indeed. During my junior year in ghigh school, I wrote a story in which the school’s delinquents and social outsiders staged a commando style attack one morning and assassinated the martinet of an assistant principal by shooting him in the gut with a flare pistol. I graphically described him falling to the floor and writhing as great billows of red smoke poured from his belly.
The attackers then rounded up all the cheerleaders and rich kids and sold them to a group of Arab and Mexican slave traders who had been invited to an auction in the school auditorium. They split up the money and hitched a ride to Brazil with one of the slavers, concluding the story with a beer bust on Copacabana beach.
All I got for this lurid flight of fancy was a lecture from the principal (who chuckled part of the time) and five demerits (It took 50 to get you expelled).
Today, of course, something like this would bring the SWAT team, the entire global media, and a major lockdown, with 10 years on probation and at least 100 years in counseling for the miscreant author.