National Propaganda Radio was nattering on this morning about teen smoking. I can't help but agree that this is the biggest problem facing this country in this last quarter of the last century of the last millennium.

Teen smoking is the absolute worst thing that could happen to a decent country. Smoking is a disgusting habit (one I adore) and while we can accept this behavior in adults, in teens it is simply anathema (look it up).

We have teens that make illegitmate babies, but that's OK. We have teens that rape younger children. We have teens that take and sell drugs and perform drive-by killings over turf, occasionally murdering innocent bystanders. We have teens that show up at their own school and shoot their classmates for fun.

BUT THESE TEENS THAT SMOKE ARE BIG TIME TROUBLE!

How DARE they smoke cigarettes!

Here's what I think we need to do with teens that smoke:

Public beheadings. Not by guillotine, either, but by huge scary looking guys with the black hoods and a long, curved scythe thing. Something out of Bergman. Some 14th century brutal Swedish monster executioner. We cut their stupid little heads off, nose rings, eyebrow rings and all. Then we stick their heads on pikes and cut up their bodies and hang their torsos from gibbets for the crows to eat. We boil them in oil. We tie them up to wild horses (are there any of those left?) and drag their smoking bodies apart. We get bloody, real bloody. Bring back the good old days of the cruelest torturous death by fire. We hit them with hot iron and we burn them at the stake.

Yeah. We do this in PUBLIC. Everyone required to attend.

That'll stop teens from smoking, I'd say. If we brutally execute enough of the little creeps, they might get a clue that SMOKING IS BAD FOR THEM.

© Patricia Neill, 1998

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