You kidding? It's even worse now with cell phones and social media. Loathe as I am to suggest "government" get involved with anything, I could see criminalizing certain forms of invasion of privacy. Take a peeping-tom photo of a nude girl in her bedroom and posting on the network should get someone prison time. It is so disgusting an act that I could readily see caning such people to within an inch of their lives for doing it, especially where minors are concerned. Of course, the bar for proving such cases would have to be high, given that people have been known to get themselves into things that later they regret and then claim they never consented.
What a wholly phucked-up world.
In most cases, yeah, but the story needed a vehicle and I suppose this was as good as any and perhaps better than most. It allowed all the perpetrators to hear in gory detail the truth as the girl saw it. It also provided the mechanisms for clearly illustrating the filth and stench of each individual's corruption and cowardice. The only characters to come out looking to have any decency were Clay, Tony, and Alex, who blew his own brains out for guilt, which of course made me feel even more awful precisely because he was good enough to feel that horrible about his role in the affair.
Adults kept teens on short leashes in ages past not because they were tyrannical $#@!-wads (though some were just that), but because they were well acquainted with the diminished capacities of most teens. Bodies are almost adult, but the brains and mind are far behind in their development both physically and experientially. It's a terrible time for many kids. God knows I hated high school with a purple passion. The stupidity and meanness of kids that age is mind numbing. And I was a dumbass - I didn't know $#@! about anything, yet all my friends spoke on subjects I didn't even know existed as if they were experts. My whole deal in those days revolved largely around wondering why I'd been born so utterly clueless. Turned out we all were, but some put up a better front of $#@! than others. I will never forget my friends like Kevin who made like they knew everything there was to know about cannabis. All I could do is wonder where in hell everyone got this expertise and why was I do bereft. It made being 16 a very tough deal for me. I should have gone directly to college from 8th grade because I needed to be around adults and not stupid teenagers. But that's the way things went and I somehow survived it.
That is certainly true. I cannot say I was ever suicidal, but I was very depressed at times; lonely and isolated even in a room with hundreds of people in it. I'd gone through terrible times as a younger child and witnessed things no kid should ever have to see. I saw many gang-rapes by older students of the younger. They once beat a third-grader until he was catatonic and proceeded to gang-bang him. I was 10 years old, and let me tell you that seeing a 7 or 8 year old child with a 1000-yard stare is something you NEVER forget. I can see him as I type these words and even now, nearly fifty years later, it makes me ill. Add to that the guilt that neither could I have stopped the event nor did I know how to help him afterward beyond taking him to the barracks and sitting with him awhile. It was as if he had left his body. The flesh was there; the soul was in Hong Kong, shopping.
Six years of that and I was a complete wreck by sophomore year when I rejoined the "normal" world. This is probably REALLY lame, but at 15 the only thing I wanted in life was to get married and have children; to be in love. I'm sure there is some psychoanalytical explanation for that sort of pathology, but I am not familiar with it. The day Cheryl McGuinness first smiled at me in biology class, I was GONE. But I was too $#@!-scared to so much as say hello to her, so we can now readily extrapolate what the next three years were like. Very rough and filled with conflict. Add to that the typical stupidities and meanness of kids that age and you can imagine how miserable I was. How I managed to get out alive sometimes confounds me.
Perhaps it's my ability to relate that got me so hooked on this horrible show about horrible people doing horrible things that lead to a horrible ending of a young life. I guess some issues never quite die, eh?
But seriously, parent's should watch it, IMO, and get a clue about how NOT to raise children as they feel the burn at the thought of so beautiful a young life coming to its untimely end for absolutely no valid reason. Making them weak as was the poor character of Hannah is doing them no honor, regardless of the desire to protect. Raising them with no stern sense of right, wrong, and basic decency is an even worse offense. I say slap that boy into the next county if that is what it takes to make it clear that he is being a $#@!ty human being. And then there is the legal climate that puts such parents into prison for having the temerity to try to save their child from becoming a boorish sociopath. What a mess it has all become. But the hippies somehow managed to open the doors to the unqualified criticisms of the judeochristian ethic that went too far, tossing the baby with the bath water.
There is so much misery in a land of such material wealth. Someone explain THAT to me.
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