subject: Murder By Nostalgia: When Yearbooks Go Bad [print this page] Suppose I put a Gloch to your temple and told you to pick any five people in your high school yearbook and execute them. This includes not just people who graduated, but dropouts. They definitely don't get rewarded for being quitters. Same goes for nerdlingers that graduated early.
A demented undertaking. Yet it is also an informative view into the heart of darkness. That is, the heart of man.
In case you are wondering, I am not insane, nor a serial killer. I am not seriously advocating doing this, merely consider it a humorous hypothetical.
Suppose you had to kill five people from your high school class. Who would you pick?
One other minor technicality to get out of the way. If anyone you went to high school with is a serial killer, rapist, child molester, or served in the Bush or Obama administrations, they don't count. The point here is to ask you to play God in the deepest and darkest sense of the word.
To rephrase it, give a group of basically decent people, none of whom are total strangers, which one would you off if forced to do so?
One of my failings is that I think macroscopically. I was never in the uber popular crowd that was the high school equivalent of movie stars or pro athletes. Rather, I was in the click just below them. Still popular, but not super-duper popular. The different attitudes of the super popular were always fascinating. Only a few seemed to appreciate how fortunate they were and were nice to the lesser people who hadn't drawn a royal flush in the genetic poker game. It always irritated me when the popular people were rude to the nerds and dweebs. It seemed like they should have been more compassionate to people who hadn't been born unusually smart, or unusually athletic, or unusually gorgeous. Or unusually anything.
That's one person I'd whack.
Victim number two, a high school classmate who shagged a teacher. I have no problem with that. But she was an ugly teacher. You're gonna shag a teacher, make it a hot one. And they always fought in the hallway during classes. I skipped enough that I often heard them. Their fights were like Beverly Hillbillies 90210. I'd grease that guy just because it's the principle of the thing.
Next to go, the super stoner that got off on torturing animals. There's always one sicko like that, isn't there? People killing other people I'm fine with. That's what humans do. Animals on the other hand have not one iota of malice. Anyone who can electrocute cats strangle wittle itty bitty bunny wabbits needs two taps to the head at point blank range.
That's three. Bet you thought this would be harder, huh?
Number four is the rat. Nobody likes a rat. You don't have to be a mobster to despise them. Okay, if you see someone robbing a bank of mugging a nun or saving a Goldman Sachs employee from being dismembered, by all means report the crime. But normal high school fun is normal high school fun, and that little paste eating tool who has to rat out the guys that fill a cheer leader's locker with crickets gets it.
One left. Thought I'd have trouble coming up with five, but now that I'm down to my last selection, I actually am having trouble narrowing it down to just one. In fact, I can't. So four it will have to be. You should start going through your yearbook and deciding what people you'd off. But only as a theoretical exercise, not for realsies.
