Please Put Me in a Room for 15 Minutes With Main Line Teens
Late last month, it was all over the news that YouTube was showing videos of students getting “shmacked.” Apparently, getting shmacked means drinking and doing drugs to the point that one is completely out of control. I suppose it’s a contraction of smashed and whacked, both things that any reasonable human being should aspire to achieve, ya think? The videos featured students from both Lower Merion and Harriton high schools. A website set up to extol the virtues of shmacking is selling t-shirts that include the colors and names of plenty of colleges and universities and, oh yea, two high schools. You guessed it: Lower Merion and Harriton. Let me tell you, we Main Liners couldn’t be any prouder. Look, my baby is on the Internet!
Getting shmacked, huh? I’d like to “shmack” every one of those idiots right across their arrogant little faces. Preferably after they’ve sobered up enough that I might knock some sense into their pea-brains. Where do you even begin to set someone straight who could be moronic enough to do something so illegal and dangerous and then promote it on the Internet? These videos weren’t taken surreptitiously from a secreted cell phone; they were produced intentionally for public consumption. Such behavior is second only to sticking your hand in the garbage disposal for level of stupidity.
College admissions and scholarship administrators are usually fairly smart people, certainly smarter than these geniuses who eagerly document such juvenile behavior on Facebook. They have resources at their disposal that allow them to quickly search the history of an applicant’s behavior. How’s that for a shmacking-good idea? If these idiots should save enough brain cells to actually graduate, hopefully they will have retained the cells that remember prospective employers have access to the same search options.
And what do these outstanding students do after they are sufficiently shmacked? Do they get into their cars and drive home? Do they stay where they are and pick a fistfight with their girlfriend? Each year, there are more than 5,000 deaths involving underage drinking, 1,900 of them from car accidents. That figure is slightly less than the total enrollment of both Harriton and LM combined. That’s a lot of dead teenagers. Smoking dope? What would shmacking be if it didn’t include getting high, right? The Community Anti-Drug Coalition cites that “smoking pot young can cause structural and functional deficits of the brain causing weakened verbal and communication skills, lowered learning capabilities and shortened attention spans.” That’s just what this world needs! Students to be brain deficient, unable to communicate or pay attention!
Here’s the problem: Teenagers have too much money, too little parental control, and too few consequences when they get caught at this foolishness. Sadly, the consequences they do suffer might easily be a stay in the hospital, a college or employment rejection, or a grieving parent.
