Dead Kids for Cash!!!!

Look at CNN.com any time of any day, and you will find at least one headline story about American's precious children being kidnapped, abused, murdered in Aruba, raped by priests, beaten, starved, or perhaps something worse. Rest assured that the availability of any product intended for mass consumption (e.g. news) is tightly regulated by America's marketing departments--so a lot of people must like reading about kids being threatened, tortured, and killed. If the stories don't affect you personally, you're supposed to enjoy them for their sheer reality (disgusting). And if they do affect you personally--if your toddler is eaten by an nun, for instance--you're supposed to get paid (even worse!).

Just look at the instance of the three poor (in both senses) sons of Camden, NJ, who famously suffocated in their aunt's semi-abandoned Toyota last month. According to our friends at CNN, the family--which probably had little previous experience with the media other than being told to buy fried chicken and Pringles--now has the AP working as their de facto spokes-service, intimidating the city police towards the unmentioned possibility of a settlement for not finding the three victims fast enough.

According to the AP article, "The question of when [the boys] died is crucial, in part because of the possibility of lawsuits against officials." The article notes that no complaints have been filed. But according to one lawyer, "responsibility for the deaths is now 'squarely on the shoulders of the police.'" The article goes on to say that the lawyer, Peter Villari, was hired "in part to see if police or anyone else may have been responsible for the deaths."

Why bother? The answer strikes me as immature as it would have nine years ago, when I began my website to rant about the inequities and abominations I saw every day during my ridiculous high school experience.

Get money from Toyota because the trunk lid fell closed. Get money from the already-impoverished city because the police (law-enforcers, not trunk-searchers, last time I checked) didn't find the kids soon enough.

Cold as it may sound, the only people who should be paying a fine are the parents, for storing an unregistered vehicle on their front lawn.

When I was reading and writing my way to becoming a Fulbright reject, I stumbled upon a book called ARCHIMEDES AND THE SEAGLE by David Ireland. In it, a thinking dog walks the streets of Sydney, Australia marveling at the highly animlaistic stupidity of the city's human citizens. Archimedes remarks with great consternation that humans accept money as compensation for the death of loved ones--why? While we could take care of our loved ones, the media makes it seems as if we can get paid not to. As long as you can stand the pain of loss and the initial legal costs, you can eat yourself to death at the Sizzler with your settlement money.