A Juvenile Delinquent Graduates

I had a terrific time skiing today. A friend I met last time I was here was able to arrange his schedule to take his spring break this week and made the trip into the mountains with me. We took his car, which has better snow tires than the car I'm driving while here and also is equipped with chains in the event they're needed. More importantly, he is accustomed to driving in snowy and icy conditions. I'm safer with him at the wheel than if I'm driving. Tomorrow two more frriend will come just for the day.

Tonight after we retired to our separate rooms, I caught an episode of the incubus' show (Judge Judy) with a particularly noxious defendant. The case involved a pre-meditated attack by one middle schooler against another one. 
The parent of the assailant was somewhat typical in her "I know exactly what happened because my daughter who would never lie told me" sort of way. It's possible in this case that the daughter really did tell her mother the truth, because the mother and the assailant daughter both seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable course of action to grab another person's hair and punch her just because you didn't like the way she looked at you. The mother looked as though she had probably beaten up more than a few people herself. 

The case itself was forgettable. The only reason I'm discussing it now is that I googled the name to see if there were any hits. There were. I googled it in part because at thirteen, the girl had been a flawless beauty. I was curious as to whether or not she retained her  [physical; she was ugly as ugly can be in every other way] beauty. She didn't. She now looks like the Tongan thug that she probably is. She works at the front desk of a Hilton that I will avoid. According to the Target baby registry, she had a child near late May of 2016. Lucky child. 

Among other things, I came  across while checking out the google hits a video made for the girl when she graduated fom high school. The video had cheesy music, pictures of the girl at various ages, and numerous pictures of her at her senior prom and at her high school graduation. This is neither here nor there and certainly no fault of hers, but the high school she attended was incredibly shabby in appearance. I thought the school may have been in Hawaii, as I've seen numerous high schools that looked like it there. In Hawaii, I would have expected schools to be built so that they could withstand monsoons, but the ones I saw looked like they wouldn't hold up to the wimpy sort of spring storms that happen once in a blue moon in southern California. I honestly didn't know public schools were built to look like that anywhere in California. Perhaps the design is an inexpensive way of making schools earthquake-safe, as even if the roof caved in on students during an earthquake, it probably wouldn't hurt anyone, as the roof looks like it's made of tagboard. The flimsiness of the school, however, is immaterial.

My real concern is the big deal that the girl's family made of her high school graduation. Since when is high school graduation a big deal? I'm reasonably certain that my brother's cat could graduate from high school if she could grip a pencil. A person has to pass X number of classes -- typically a person could fail one class every other semester and still have space in his or her schedule to re-take the failed clsses in order to graduate. At some point in his or her high school career, in order to graduate, a student has to pass the CAHSEE -- an exam so incredibly rigorous that  a seventh grader who is meeting grade level standards would ace the esam. It's not like the olden days when a family desperately needed its able-bodied offspring to work in the fields, and sending them to high school might have meant the family couldn't harvest its crops before the autumn rains came. Back then, high school graduation came only with major sacrifice from an entire family.

Even now in some cases a kid may have to work a night shift somewhere to help support his or her family, then drag himself or herself to school and try to remain wake. Such young people have more drive and determination than I can imagine. Such was not the case, however,  for the little thug who lured another girl to the mall so that she could attack the unsuspecting girl.  That kid didn't encounter significantly more hurdles than I did in completing high school.  She was scarcely worthy of the paper on which her diploma was printed, much less of the sickeningly sentimental video made by her relative.