A Prank Gone Wrong

Some of you may not know this, but this guiri has participated in her share of pranks. Despite my current polished, sophisticated demeanor, I was once part of a team of master pranksters in my college days. My friends and I took great measures to make each prank bigger and more spectacular than the last, and I do believe there is a giant lizard painted on a rock somewhere near Emory, Virginia which bears testimony to said fact. We stacked all of the tables in the dining hall on top of one another and covered the entire room with cling wrap, had secret sleepover parties in the campus library and even launched fistfuls of an entire Butterball turkey’s worth of cold cuts at an unsuspecting talent show audience. To achieve these and many other entertaining feats my friends and I were required to bend a few rules and break a few laws, but in the sleepy town of Bristol, Tennessee no one seemed to mind much.

One of our most popular pranks was “rolling” the neighboring houses, which consisted of stealing dozens of rolls of toilet paper from our dormitory bathrooms and creating breathtaking works of toilet paper art on and around Bristol homes. From an ecological standpoint, this was a tragic waste of trees, but I hope my readers will forgive my youthful squandering of our natural resources in the name of good, old fashioned fun. And even if you are of the opinion that this sort of frivolity should not go unpunished, surely you don’t believe pranksters should be punished by death, right?

I was appalled to learn this morning that a Solon Township, Michigan man does, in fact, believe that the perpetrators of such pranks actually deserve to be shot at indiscriminately. According to an article on the Fox News website, four fourteen year old boys were decorating a house with toilet paper on Sunday night when the house’s owner decided that was as good an excuse as any to open fire on the same kid THREE times “from a 12-gauge shotgun, striking the 14-year-old in the chest, stomach and leg”. Thankfully, the kid is currently recovering in the hospital and I hope with all my heart he has a full recovery. In case you’re wondering, the homeowner is sitting pretty at home while prosecutors try to find grounds to press charges against him. I would like to think his guilty conscience will be punishment enough, but I have to admit I have my doubts.

The fact that people distrust one another so much that one of the oldest pranks in the book can now get a kid shot is a very sad commentary on the waning sense of community worldwide. But what I find even more tragic is the fact that many irresponsible acts based on this mistrust remain largely unpunished in the US, which only encourages people to act impulsively on their mistrust by shooting first and calling the police once tragedy has already struck. And so we shake our heads and cluck our tongues when we hear of these tragedies, but what are we actually doing to prevent them?