I was at a neighbors house when I read about it in the local paper, “Local High School Coach Accused of Sexual Assault.”

I didn’t even need to read the article to know who or what it was about. I immediately ran home and called by best friend Clint. “They got him!”

We were mostly indifferent to Coach Montgomery except insofar as we feared him. He had this cold and mean way of looking at us. We were in regular Phys Ed, meaning that we weren’t athletes. We were also boys, making us even more useless to him. More on that in a moment. We’d had coaches yell at us before, but he wasn’t one of them. Coach Montgomery had a quiet scorn for us girly boys that were just as happy sitting around talking as we were lifting weights.

But while he didn’t like girly boys, he sure loved girly girls. We noticed it almost instantly. When he wasn’t scaring the living hell out of us with a glare, he was smiling and flirting with the girl students. He was initiating borderline human contact, meaning that he wasn’t touching them in inappropriate places, but he seemed eager to make physical contact with him. Many of the girls really appreciated the attention. Though not a remarkably handsome man, he had an incredibly impressive physique. While we were dodging basketballs thrown at our heads, he was otherwise occupied.

His inappropriate interests caught up with him and a girl’s parents found out about it. Once it’s out there, girls start stepping forward out of the woodwork. The secret that nobody cared about was suddenly out in the open. Coach Montgomery was having sex with students. A lot of them. When it all came out parents and administrators was wondering why no one had said anything. Our answer was that nobody asked. In all honestly we knew it was goofy and morally suspect, but it didn’t seem as monstrous to us as it did to parents. There was never any indication that the sex wasn’t consensual, even though some of the girls later apparently regretted it. The concept of authoritative manipulation hadn’t really been introduced to us at that point.

In between the initial questioning and his eventual arrest, Montgomery attempted suicide using pills of some sort. I don’t know what happened to him, but his career was over and his life wasn’t doing much better. Clint and I actually got a little bit of delight in it all. We didn’t like Montgomery and we couldn’t appreciate what was so wrong about it because sexual harassment was something that happened to adults and authoritative manipulation was a concept we hadn’t really been introduced to.

“It’s kind of funny that his life is practically over but Horton got away almost without a scratch,” Clint mentioned. Not well-versed in the ways of romance and certainly not that between an adult and a peer, the reason that we were so quick to pick up on what Montgomery was doing was because he looked at the girl students the same way that Coach Horton did.

Coach Horton was our coach throughout elementary school. Like Montgomery, he had little use for male students that weren’t athletic and he had too many uses for girls of all sorts. Except unlike with Montgomery, these girls were in elementary school. Rumors swirled for quite a while about the favoritism that he showed girls and the inappropriate ways that he would touch them. Nothing nearly as straightforward as Montgomery (as far as anyone knew), but the kind of creepy thing that lingers with girls years later.

Despite all the rumors and some awareness by the school’s administrators, Horton was there throughout my brothers’ tenure at West Oak Elementary up until we were in the fourth grade. At some point he slipped up and touched the wrong girl in the wrong place. A girl whose parents had enough pull in the community that they didn’t have to worry about the social repercussions of making an accusation. The problem for West Oak administrators was that if they were to fire him for molestation they would be be admitting that it took place and opening themselves up for a world of lawsuits from hundreds of parents. So they ultimately fired him for showing favoritism towards girls.

Last I heard, he was an elementary school coach in Colorado.

“Yeah, he actually said ‘Christ’s butt’… I didn’t know he had that kind of curseword innovation in him,” Clint said. We were driving to the copy store. We’d only gotten 200 copies of our flier but Hugh though it was obvious that we’d need at least 500. So to avoid Hugh’s wrath and get away for a few minutes, Clint, Quen and I all volunteered to go to the copy store right away.

“And you can’t remember what he was cursing about?” I asked.

“No… wait, yeah, that’s it. He was talking about you,” he told me, “he was upset about the whole hotel room thing. He was all like ‘Christ’s butt, can’t he take responsibility for anything?!”

Almost immediately, a wave of hot rage swept over my body. “He… said… what?!”

My college roommate Hubert always took really good care of his things. It became a sticking point of our friendship because I only cared about stuff insofar as they worked. I’m the kind of guy that goes to a used car lot looking for a car with a dent on it so I can get a discount, even if I can easily afford the car without a dent. Hugh, despite his protestations, was not cut from that cloth. He liked to own the nicest of things and took good care of them.

I used to give him a friendly ribbing on the subject and, once upon a time, he would rib back at my sloppiness. There was one time when I made a joke about the obsessive way that he protected his comic books. I can’t remember what I said, but I do remember that it wasn’t out of bounds. Then, out of nowhere, in a room full of friends, he started screaming at me. Everyone’s eyes just bulged open. After a few minutes he calmed down and was somewhat apologetic about his outburst. I never raised my voice throughout the whole incident and calmly told him that if my ribbing him on the subject was out of bounds, he needed to tell me privately and calmly. He said that it wasn’t and that he was just having a bad day.

He was having a lot of bad days. It was not a good time in his life. He’d just aborted his physics major over the protestations of his mother. He was looking into hiring a voice acting agent over even greater protestations. His mother and his step-father were divorcing and the money they had was being tied up. It was because of this that I took a lot more abuse from him than I would ordinarily take from anybody.

In about the same timeframe I was watching an anime series that he had purchased. I must confess, I was less than entirely careful with his tapes. One of the boxes got sat on by a roommate and he was so upset that he was shaking when he held the collapsed box. I apologized profusely and offered to replace it. He demurred and said it was fine. Not long afterwards a tape got dinged by my chair. We looked at the tape and it looked like its contents were undamaged. He swore, however, that what I’d done would make the tape get worse over time (faster than a VHS usually does, anyway). I told him that I didn’t think that it would, but again offered to replace it anyway. Again, he demurred.

A couple months later a bunch of new friends were invited over and they watched the series. The fourth tape wasn’t looking so good. I chalked it up to the crappy TV and VCR that we had and started working on my computer again. He decided to make an announcement that I had ruined this tape and failed to take responsibility for it. He asked each one of them if the tape looked okay to them and then pointed out that I had said that the tape was fine. I didn’t say anything, surfed to an online retailer, and ordered the new set to arrive the following week. Thirty minutes later I remembered that it was the fifth tape that I’d dinged with my chair and the fourth tape was unscathed. In other words, I’d been vindicated. I don’t know that I even told him about that. I just gave him the new tapes. It was worth the $100 just to shut him up on the subject.

While all of this was going on, he was getting on a lot of people’s nerves. It seemed that nearly every mutual acquaintance we had told me privately that they didn’t know how I could stand to live with him. Clint and Quen, two colleagues on a creative project with Hugh and I, were constantly butting heads with him. Time and time again, I defended Hugh. I told them that he was going through a rough patch and that it would get better.

The following summer we went to a convention to show off our creative project. There was a minor mishap with the hotel. Because I was the one with the money, it was my job to make the hotel reservations. We were a little late moving that Thursday night and Hugh said that I needed to call the hotel and let them know because they might give up the room. I pointed out that I’d had confirmed reservations with my credit card, meaning that they couldn’t give up the room even if we never showed up, but that they’d charge me for it anyway. Figuring that it would take a while to corral the cats, I made sure of that. My assurances, however, meant nothing to Hugh.

When we got to the hotel, they’d apparently booked the rooms for the wrong nights. This was all Hugh needed in order to be vindicated. If I’d called to confirm, none of this would have happened. True enough, though that wasn’t why he wanted me to call them. He wanted me to call them because they’d give up my room, which was not the case. In any case, the person behind the counter at the hotel demonstrated such ineptitude that it was clear that it probably was not my fault that the rooms got reserved on the wrong night. In any case, they found us a room and that was that. Or so I thought.

We were scrambling to get enough fliers for our presentation when I found out about Hugh’s unique curseword. It wasn’t so much that he was angry at me as I’d learned to accept the fact that any time anything wasn’t quite up to his specifications he would be. It wasn’t even that he was angry behind my back, honestly that was preferable. It was that he accused me of being irresponsible. At the time I was working 40 hours a week. I had a full 15-hour courseload. I had a fulltime girlfriend. I had a part-time job with a local partisan newspaper and a column at Southern Tech’s daily newspaper. He, meanwhile, had a 6-hour courseload because of the changed major. He had no job, though his having to look for one was sufficiently woe betiding to make us hear about it. He had no girlfriend, which understandably sucked but was nonetheless one less responsibility.

And there he was calling me irresponsible because, in between my jobs and my coursework and my girlfriend, I hadn’t made the time to confirm a reservation that I’d managed to make on my own time with my own $600.

Livid does not even begin to describe it. Quen said that he’d never seen me so angry. Clint had, but it had been a long time. I don’t know if there’s ever been a point where I’d directed so many expletives at a person in my life. It ordinarily was not my style to do so, but words could not convey the anger I was feeling. I had spent the previous six months defending him. I had been the one that had refrained from making judgments about him, even though I had faced more the brunt of his malcontent than anyone else (simply because I was living with him). I bit my tongue when he took rather hurtful jabs at my girlfriend. When he’d screamed at me. I’d even kept from him the complaints of others, including the fact that he was the reason that our former roommates Saresh and Dennis terminated our 4-person roommate arrangement. It honestly wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d not been such a good friend to him, but I was the best friend he had at great emotional cost to myself.

We lived together for about a year after that and it was all downhill. I no longer bothered really trying to be his friend. I found reasons to stay away from the dorm as much as possible. I started badmouthing him with the rest. When he got angry at my sloppiness, I’d just become more sloppy. The only thing I really did for him was to secure him a good job and that was as much for my benefit as his. The funny and sad thing is that I don’t know that he even really noticed the difference.

A couple months later there was a young lady who spent a lot of time at our dorm. She showered and left the tower on the floow. He screamed at her and embarassed me. I sent an email to Quen starting with the words “Want to hear another Hugh story” and told the story in a light very unflattering to Hugh. Hugh later ran across this email (he says that I asked him to look through my email box to find a phone number, though I have no recollection of that) and seemed genuinely surprised that I might hold him in somewhat low regard. He was apparently that oblivious to my actions towards him.

I don’t know that I’ve ever directed as much venom to anybody personally as I’ve directed at him. There was a time when it seemed every conversation I had with Clint or Quen would at least briefly turn into a conversation about Hugh. Partly it’s because of the sense of betrayal for the person I had been a best friend to, but partly it’s something else.

He and I were and are alike in so many ways that it haunted me. The reason we became friends and roomed together in the first place was because we had so much in common. Not just interests but also temperament. We saw the world in very similar ways. We’re both idealistic and yet cautious, introverted and yet draw strength from others, hard-headed and yet intellectually curious, naturally rigid and yet have a desire to be more laid back. I saw myself in him and it was the stuff of nightmares. I devoted a lot of time and energy in being as unlike him as possible. In some ways I still use the lessons that the Big Bad Hubert taught me when it comes to dealing with other people and they’ve made me a better person.

But trying to be unlike someone that is unlike yourself takes a toll. I found myself believing things I didn’t really believe simply because he believed the opposite. I found myself acting in ways that weren’t me and couldn’t be me because they were ways that he would never act. And ironically it lead me into being the spiteful person that he was back then.

It’s approaching ten years now since all of that went down. Hugh is an entirely different person now. He’s become the kind of guy that I could again become good friends with. But I don’t think I can. That’s a subject for another time.

The other day I found myself thinking of two different kids that I knew back in junior high that called me “friend.” Two very, very different kids.

Lewis Hibbard sat beside me. He was a stocky guy, some of it fat and some of it just bulk. He had an unusual mean streak, even for a junior high kid. He also chose his victims well, of which I was one. While Coach Dawson taught us American History, he would take a pen and jab it in my arm. It was more a stab than a poke. When he would get started, my arm would be bleeding by the time I left class. Without words, he dared me repeatedly to rat him out. Being a stupid kid in junior high that didn’t want to be the kind of kid to rat a guy out, I took it. I never said a word to anybody about what he was doing while our hapless teacher wasn’t paying attention. I am at once proud and angry at my silence.

He was a sadist then and I would be surprised if he wasn’t one now. I’m not sure what compels someone to stab a classmate. Yet despite the physical abuse, it never felt like he was picking on me. He never made fun of me. In fact, he never said anything negative to me at all that I can remember. In some perverse way, I think he considered me his friend. But nor did he do it because I was his friend… rather it seemed that I was his friend because I endured it.

One row over, two seats in front sat Orson Millard. Orson was a scrawny and short kid. He wasn’t smart enough to get in the honors class, though like me he stood out in the regulars. To Orson, I wasn’t a just a friend, I was his best friend. As far as I know, I was his only friend. I don’t recall being particularly nice to him, but since everyone else behaved so maliciously towards him, my relative indifference was the most kindness he’d seen.

In addition to being small and nerdy, he was also just a little bit weird. One day he mentioned, in passing, that his mother still bathed him. Had someone else said it we would have assumed that he was joking or lying to get attention, but he was nothing if not an earnest young man. Anyway, this little factual tidbit made its way around the classroom in very short order. Half the class was stunned, the other half couldn’t resist making fun of someone that was still being bathed by his mother at thirteen. The only person that came to his defense was the Coach Dawson, who said that his mother had bathed him when he was thirteen, too. It was his oafish attempt to get the kids to lay off, but it only confused us more.

Looking back and remembering meek little Orson, I wonder if rather than an odd little piece of creepy information what he told us was indicative of his timid, passive nature. I wonder what kind of mother continues to bathe her son at 13 and I don’t come up with very many benign answers. In fact, what comes to mind is a mother that likes to touch young men. If it were a father bathing his daughter at that age, it would almost certainly have caught the attention of the authorities. Looking back I think it should have been brought to their attention regardless.

Neither Lewis nor Orson went to high school with me. I figure that Orson just moved away and Lewis was probably placed in the district’s alternative school for thugs, troublemakers, and girls who found themselves pregnant.

I’d be interested in knowing what happened to each. I can’t image either story having a particularly happy ending.

Several years ago I dated a girl that was a public school teacher in a middle school in inner-city Colosse. Her occupation was a plus on the general assessment as teaching is an admirable occupation. Though she didn’t particularly choose her school (when you’re doing on-the-job certification, your school is chosen for you) it was still a tough job that doesn’t get enough recognition. That was my thinking going in to it.

The scorn that she had for her students made itself apparent very quickly. I was understanding about it until she talked about how some days she would see how many students she could get to cry. There wasn’t another date after that. “Who,” I thought to myself, “gets pleasure out of making junior high school kids cry in class?”

Coming out of a convenience store at lunch, I saw a couple mothers coming out of the Laundromat right across from the convenience store. One of the little boys was fussing up a storm with an obnoxious little whine. My sympathy for the mother started to dwindle when she started mocking her kid’s whine. Then again, I don’t have any kids and I figured maybe that was the only thing that worked so maybe that was excusable. Then she threatened to put the kid (probably 8 years old or so) in his little sister’s babyseat. The kid started bawling.

Then the mother of the bawling child bragged to the other mother about what she had just accomplished.

Yessirree… getting an already whiney eight year old to cry. That’s sure something to be proud of, isn’t it? It was quite difficult to imagine any way at all in which that might be remotely helpful. But Mommy got to feel good about her temperamental superiority, which was apparently what was really important to her.

Over at Bobvis, a conversation about college education turned into a conversation about creepy older guys at college that couldn’t get any action.

Though I don’t have any creepy old guy stories, I have a creepy young guy story.

I was nonetheless reminded of Honors Chemistry II, which I took my junior year in college. For whatever reason, my class of 15 had only three guys in it. I was actually the only male to show the first day and one of them actually dropped the course before ever showing up..

I had to admit, I liked the odds!

I was actually sort of dating someone at the time, but my putative girlfriend and I were on a not-so-subtle race to see who could lend out of the relationship more safely and quickly than the other. I set my sights pretty quickly on a cute, smiley young lady named Kara.

Kara had already been partnered up with the Other Guy, who hadn’t shown up the first labs (neither had the third guy, but he’d dropped the course apparently before ever showing up). She had been working with me and my partner, which was how I had been getting to know her. So I wasn’t sure what to expect except an irrational fear of competition that had been drilled into me by a confidence-sapping significant other that had been persistently framing every boy she knew as potential competition for the four months that we’d gotten to know one another.

Anyway, so the guy finally showed.

He was wearing gel in his hair, jewelry all over, a smug smile, and more sexual desperation than I had ever seen on anybody in my entire life. Never in my life had I seen someone that oozed sexual frustration out of every poor of his body. You know that guy who pretends to be cool, but when he does it only outlines how uncool he is? Think Michael Scott from The Office. Yeah, this guy was pretending, from the get go, that he had ever had sex in his short and obviously miserable life, which was only outlining how lonely and desperate he was.

I can’t even explain what about him gave me the impression that I got, but my lab partner and Kara had apparently been thinking the exact same thing. “I need to take a shower whenever I think about him,” Kara later told me.

In some respects, I ought to feel sorry for the guy. He was most likely born with unexceptional (though not necessarily ugly) appearances. He was probably born utterly devoid of a personality. But some people just kick off a certain gear in your head that says “this guy is unsafe.” I don’t even know what I would fear that he might do, if alone with a woman and something went awry, but prior to meeting him I didn’t know such pitiable miscreants existed.

I ended up dropping the class myself. My interest in Kara waned the more I got to know her. The girl I was seeing beat me in the race out of the relationship that we both detested.

Logtar has a post on whether it is education or experience that matters more in the IT world and comes down somewhat on the side of experience. More people than not in the comment section agree.

Functionally, I have to agree with the consensus. The eighteen months of experience I racked up while in college proved almost as useful as my college degree. When I left Wildcat (my first post-collegiate job), my three years of experience was probably worth more than my degree when it came to getting a job. Even now, with five years of experience under my belt, I suspect that I would be better positioned had I spent the late nineties in the workforce rather than in college.

As far as whether or not that should be the case, I’m not so sure. When it comes to doing a particular job, such as network administration, experience does count more than education. In the broader scope of things, however, I find that my college degree has helped me as much as my work experience. Part of that is that I have become a “utility infielder” of sorts and am not very specialized. I have a couple of years of XML programming experience, a couple of years of SQL database experience, a couple years as a network admin, and a couple of years as a network technician. So my experience hasn’t carried over as well from one job to the next.

However, I find that having a college degree is ideal for working a more general position at a smallish or medium-size company. Small companies are always changing, as are job-responsibilities. It’s less about “doing a job” and more about “helping the company.” You don’t just have a series of responsibilities, you try to find new ways to contribute. It was college, much more than the work-world, that gave me the versitility to excel in these kinds of environments. And these are the environments that, despite my constant complaints about the chaos, I much prefer over the corporate alternative.

On the other hand, this versitility wouldn’t mean much of anything at a larger corporation until it was time to move into a more management position, by which time there is a good chance I would have forgotton most of what I learned by being in the narrows for several years.

When I was in middle school I was a pretty big guy. Big being a euphemism for fat. I also hadn’t figured out what to do with my hair yet. And I wore slacks instead of jeans. And I didn’t know the first thing about how to talk to girls. When I had a growth spurt in the 8th grade, started combing my hair back, and got comfortable in jeans, social acceptability followed. By the time I was in high school, no one knew what an unpleasant dork I had previously been.

That lead to some interesting experiences. When people who became my friends said nasty things about fat kids, they didn’t know that I used to be fat. When girls made unfavorable comments about nerds, they didn’t know how much of one I was. Every negative thing they said about who I used to be was noted, registered, and put in the back of my mind. The more of them there were, the less likely I was to get too close to them. Some of them wondered why I always kept my distance.

The biggest contingent on the OSI Team has been the Kimball Alumni Club. Kimball is one of the bigger employers in the Mocum area, handling customer service for cell phone companies. Deseret is a dream for phone support outsourcing. You have articulate young men and women with a solid education and a good command of the English language without a whole lot of job prospects. Phone support jobs here pay $2/hr less than they do in Colosse and are twice as difficult to get.

The first Kimball alum to get hired at Falstaff was Simon. Simon got the job the way most people did at that point: he knew someone else that worked here at the time. Once Kimball saw jobs that paid $9.50 an hour doing easier and more respectable work than answering phones (codemonkey beats phonemonkey on a resume), at every opening he would call one of his friends at Kimball. First was Del, whom I wish hadn’t been promoted out of the department because we could really use him. Second was Melvin, who is the best programmer OSI has ever seen. Then came Martin, whose ability to wade through docs. Take the best and most important full-time people the department has seen in the past year, and almost all of them came from Kimball.

I am an exception. But at some point I got incorporated into that group. Not sure when it was, but I think it was when we were conspiring to get rid of Golden Boy, or maybe it was when Melvin got moved into QA, making 2/3 of QA Kimball alums. I’m not only not sure when I became part of the group, but I’m not sure when we actually became a group.

Since coming to Falstaff, Simon has quietly been building an empire.

One of the ongoing problems in the department is that everyone is enthusiastic about doing everything that isn’t their job. I was always aching to work on my database application; Melvin has Melvin’s App; Adam is always volunteering for stuff that will get him out of actual ANG programming. There is painstakingly little that is glamorous about what we do within the company. It looks good on a resume, but it generates little respect within the company. As such, there is a drive to become more than just an ANG Programmer or OSI Programmer. The good news is that a lot of people have found a lot of ways to contribute to the company. The bad news is that people sound offended when you tell them that while the project they’re proposing sounds great, our programming workload is only increasing. The problem is that as Falstaff starts hiring increasingly overqualified people for the department, everyone believes that they are worthy of more than they are presently tasked with doing.

And, for the most part, they are.

I’m not sure if anyone has a bigger claim to overqualification than Freddie Paste. Freddie graduated Cum Laude from the University of Tennessee with a degree in Computer Science. His first job turned out to be a drafting position, where he learned that skill as well. But despite the overqualification he brings to the position, only Simon is better at keeping his nose to the grindstone. The guy is a workhorse. His productivity is phenomenal and his accuracy is not bad. He was hired on to work on reports, so he works on reports. Works overtime when asked. Works through lunch when asked. Doesn’t get distracted when conversation strikes.

Freddie and I get along quite well. He was here for a couple months before I ever really talked to him, but once I did we were natural friends. We’re both southerners. We both have college degrees and are probably the two most overqualified people in the department. We both came to Deseret because of opportunities for our wives.

I’ve noticed in recent weeks, however, that it seems that the Kimball Alumni are unusually hostile towards Freddie. They were not particularly congratulatory when Freddie got Employee of the Month. The general consensus was that he got it because they were itching to give it to someone in our department and he was the pointleader. Freddie is never really invited to our outings, though I’m not sure if he would really go to begin with. Freddie, for his part, is not the most social person in the world.

It does make me wonder, however, the basis on which I got incorporated into their group and he did not. Was it because I got deference by Melvin and Martin because I was in QA grading their work? Did Simon and I get along because QA can be a lonely place to be? Because Paige liked me? Am I there by way of luck and if I wasn’t in their group would they think that I got the leadership position because I get along better with Willard than they do?

They’re nowhere near cruel to Freddie as my confidants in high school were about the fat kids and the nerds. But they are oddly indifferent and not nearly as friendly. It leads me to wonder about those that I am unfriendly to and how much of that is circumstancial.

It’s interesting to think about… and not particularly in a good way.

Charlie: What I don’t understand is how come I need to take classes in sociology to become a computer programmer?

Me: Everyone should take sociology.

Charlie: Why?

Me: Because the ability to compare cultures and acknowledge the cultural norms that we take for granted will make you a more worldwise person.

Charlie: But will it make me a better programmer?

Me: Considering that you’ll probably be working with a bunch of outsourcing Indians, probably so.

Bob Krumm has a couple interesting posts on the subject of sex with minors (both minors and minors and adults and minors).

Mr. Krumm makes a good point about the parents in all this. I remember when I was in school I was quite frankly amazed at the lattitude a lot of my classmates had. Of course, my best friend Clint was amazed at the lattitude I had. In fact, I had more than did most of my friends, but far less than the average person my age (or so it seemed). It often seems that many of the same parents that dutifully speak and vote as though they are concerned with cultural sexual decadence often become complicit in enabling that sort of behavior.

On the other hand, as Chris Ware points out in the comment section, the fact that kids like to have sex is not news and not a product of poor parenting as much as it is biology. Giving kids the freedom to (covertly or overtly) experiment sexually, however, certainly does fall on the parents.

How much parents should hold their kids back sexually is a value judgment, though. A tough one, in my view. On the whole, we can only contain biology so much. Holding sex until after marriage was a considerably more realistic option for more people when you could expect to get married between 18-25. Mormons are able to pull it off in higher numbers in part because their sons are often off to their missions at 19 and then come back at 21 ready to settle down with the 18-19 year old young ladies getting out of high school. It’s as good a set-up as I can imagine provided that you want your kids to marry young.

Historically speaking, the fifteen and sixteen year olds that are having sex now aren’t remarkably young to be having sex. It just seems to me that we’ve pushed growing up so far back that (a) it seems to be unconscionably young because marriage is presumably so far off and (b) they are likely less emotionally and mentally equipped to handle what they may be ready for physically. Both tie together in my mind, though, because they are often less equipped to deal with sex because marriage seems to be so far off because we’ve moved the milestones so far out that they have not been charged with the responsibilities that are required for one to grow.

A lot of the vapidity we can see in youth today can be traced to, as much as anything else, boredom. Middle class kids with educated parents are generally smart enough that school requires less than three hours of brainpower a day. And most of school is (or seems to be at the time, for sure) just jumping through arbitrary hoops anyhow. Extracurricular activities also usually seem to revolve around socialization or around flexing physical or mental muscles for the arbitrary end of winning the game. We’ve recast recreational activities as responsibilities (often superceding the relatively minor academic responsibilities that do exist).

To put it in Reality TV terms, it’s the difference between Big Brother and Survivor. Survivor has its arbitrary rules and whatnot, but a lot of energy there is expended towards surviving and trying to get as comfortable as possible. Alliances are partially found and kept on ability and work ethic in addition to who likes whom. Big Brother, on the other hand, already starts out with the characters being reasonably comfortable and so twice the energy is devoted towards socialization. Who likes whom moves from being a factor to being the ultimate factor.

Due to a lot of factors, including what I believe is a failure to thoroughly challenge young people, kids spend more time thinking about what other kids think than they do anything else. The frivolous pursuit of social status that the parents must balance with financial, employment, and childrearing responsibilities exists in the lives of the younger ones without any appropriate counterbalance. It mostly serves to fill the vacuum left by not having to work on the farm, not having to learn a trade, and not having to devote a day’s work into making decent (if not great) grades.

And because of this vacuum, physical desires that may ordinarily be put off, suppressed, and ignored begin to flower at a time inconducive for it to. The ultimate problem, in my view, with teenage sex is that the kids are ill-equipped to deal with it emotionally and they are absolutely ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of it — pregnancy. With birth control, however, we’ve given the illusion that they will not have to deal with it because we have made it to where they most likely won’t. With this, we’ve taken what little external responsibility that comes with having sex out of their hands. Or at least we’ve given them that illusion. The dirty little secret about birth control is that it has probably caused more unwanted pregnancies than it has prevented in the same way that rugby is safer than football because it lacks the protective gear.

Let me state unequivocally that I am a fan of the existence of birth control and I’m not very much interested in a discussion over the morality of birth control or abortion in this forum. But I do think that the results have been more mixed than we often consider. The cat has been let out of the bag, though, and I don’t believe it can be shoved back in.

Regardless, though, it is another example where we’ve taken responsibility and power away from our young in favor of prolonging youth. It seems that much of the last half of the last century was spent carving out a holding tank for young people. The intent was to take responsibilities out of the way so that they could form in our formative years. What I believe we’ve missed is that by postponing real responsibility past the adolescent years, many of the attitudes are not being formed in a time of entitlement when many of their actions (or inactions) have no real consequences and reality is so warped around that reality, making them ill-equipped at age 14 (or sometimes even 24) to accept responsibilities when they unavoidably intrude.

I was, to say the least, not particularly popular in junior high. Fat and weird are a pretty bad combo in what is already a tough age period. I tried being tough and standing up for myself, but I wasn’t particularly convincing because by-and-large I could not fight back due to parental constraints. Trying to avoid them just goaded them on.

Eventually I discovered the secret: Bribe them.

Most of the bullies were not really the sharpest tools in the shed. Most of them struggled just to pass. By ‘struggle’ I mean beg, whine, complain, and do anything to cojole the teachers into giving them a grade they didn’t earn — for them, that was struggling. I think it started with Jack Knowles. Jack was pretty cold in our sixth-grade year, but in the seventh he sat next to me in a couple key classes. One day he had completely forgotten about a big assignment and was so desperate that he asked for my help. I doubt I was conniving enough to see the opportunity and I think I was just afraid to say no, so I gave him the answers.

It turns out that you don’t need to bribe all the tough kids. If you get one or two in your corner the rest will find someone else to pick on a la The Gator Theory. Of course, once they’ve found that they can lean on you they won’t stop using you. I’m not sure whether it’s the intelligence to see an opportunity or the stupidity that comes with a short memory, but a certain contingent of the bullies would befriend their enablers. Sometimes it was just a matter of passing along my homework, though sometimes I was doing homework for classes that I wasn’t even taking. Far from feeling abused, I actually felt appreciated. Before long I had placated a handful of former tormentors and even won a few friends. My yearbook is strewn with signatures and notes from Jack, other former tormentors, and friends I made through them.

High school was a vast improvement and I didn’t quite need the protection. I was getting taller and a less bulky and a high school of 4,000 allows for anonymity that a junior high of 900 does not. But saying “no” was less a strong point then than it is now (and it’s not exactly my strong point now) and I managed to work my way out of the cellar of the caste system by placating verbal abusers. In leiu of saying “no” to people I wanted to say “no” to, I started charging money. I never took World History in high school, but I knew m0re about Egyptian history than some of my clients that did. I had even developed methods of communications during tests.

I got caught once or twice and my grades suffered (though no disciplinary action was taken). That just served as justification to drive the price up higher for those that paid (by that point, most of the tormentors had fallen a grade or two behind me or been shipped off to the alternative school).

It’s interesting sometimes the moral blindspots we develop. In some ways the whole thing bolstered my contempt for public education. In a couple of cases I was caught dead-to-rights and nothing happened. The teachers were too worn out and apathetic to care. In that vein I can sort of understand why criminals continue to commit the same crimes and get tossed in to prison repeatedly. It’s not so much that I think prison life would be easy but that they are threatened with the moon and the stars and then given light sentences with moderate supervision afterwards. The criminal justice system just goes through the motions and eventually it just becomes a dance.

A dance.

I never needed the money the same way that I needed the protection. But it became apparent that few teachers really had the energy to care. It also seemed to me then (more than it does now) that the whole school system was a dance. Jump through this hoop and then the next one. It felt more like just doing sprints rather than actually playing ball. I didn’t realize then as I do now that those sprints pay off in the long run. My ability to jump through those hoops served more purpose than actually doing so.

If I feel guilty about anything, it’s about being an enabler for some of my clients. One of the bigger problems I have with public education as I experienced it was the inability or stubborn refusal to draw the line in the sand and fail kids that deserve to fail. I saw this firsthand in elementary school as I got 70 after 70 — it’s unlikely that I fell just on the right side of the pass/fail line so many times. It wasn’t until I got my first failing grade that I started to straighten up. The same system that coddled me also coddled my bullies. I suppose I could have drawn a line in the sand and told some of these people that they have to get their act together or they will fail because I wouldn’t help them.

But ultimately, what would have been the point?

It’s an easy trap to fall in to, to say to yourself that the world is so screwed up that no one will notice or care when you deviate from the line. Download illegal files, get a radar detector, take some juice so that you can measure up against your competitors that are all taking, and cheat in school and help others do so. When the data table is corrupt, it doesn’t matter what’s on the files, really.

It’s such a seductive argument that it can’t help but pervade my consciousness. It’s such a destructive argument that I really wish it didn’t.