”I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?”
- Bill cosby in a speech to the NAACP on May 17.

I am hysterical. No seriously, I am really funny. I was just reading some of my past editorials and I just kept laughing. It just kept cracking me up. Man, you guys must be rolling on the floor when you read this crap. I mean…I was…so take that for what it is.

I suppose that last paragraph was mildly arrogant, but then again what do I really care? I guess I really don’t, but I do hate latchkey kids. Nice segue eh? I thought so. Anyway, back to the heart of the matter because this editorial is all about how much I hate latchkey kids. So, what is so bad about latchkey kids? Well I am glad that you are interested in knowing.

I was riding the subway roughly a few weeks ago over in queens. Coming from Laguardia Airport, I had to travel through a large chunk of queens before going under the east river and entering Manhattan. About one stop into my travels the gates of hell opened, and demons flooded the train. They started talking loud and shouting and throwing stuff and…oh God…flirting. Now this could be my imagination, and I suppose that given the fact that it was about time for school to let out (and come to think of it, the demons were all dressed in uniform) maybe they were actually a bunch of 5th through 8th graders.

Now I understand that riding the subway home in New York is like walking home in suburbia. A lot of kids do it and it keeps parents from having to come pick their kids up. While I understand the importance, relevance, and convenience of the subway for children, I would really rather wish that parents locked their child in the basement and beat them. Wait no…that was harsh…maybe just beat them. Alright, alright…maybe just disciplined them so they didn’t act like their parents should beat them.

You see the problem here is that if you don’t discipline them, then it will eventually get worse and it will leave you with no recourse but to chop them into tiny pieces and put them into a stew…courtesy of Jonathan Swift (different reasoning but the heart of his idea is still apropos).

Don’t get me wrong, I like children, I just dislike the characteristic ‘rude.’ Maybe their parents should just do a better job of making them less ‘suck.’ I guess that now, as I think about it, some of the crap I pulled when I was a kid was really worthless. Like throwing things at cars on the road, feeding my vegetables to the heating vent to dispose of them (which was fairly effective for quite some time), and there was this one time that I told my neighbor he was adopted, and he actually was…I was saying it to put him down.

So, in retrospect I was a pretty crappy kid. So kids will be kids, but I got punished for most everything I did, and certainly everything my parents found out about.

It may feel like I have gone all over the place here, but I really haven’t. At the heart of all of this are the latchkey kids. Those kids that travel home by themselves and their parents aren’t there when they get in, so there is no accountability on this little kid’s life. So here is my proposal:

Each kid, upon being released from school, is issued a small collar with two little tiny metal contact points on them. Then there is a controller that is given to me and when I get annoyed with them I shock…and they all get shocked at once…regardless of who did it. Each kid goes back to his prospective part of town and if I see even one kid acting up they all get shocked. It’s that old coach adage about how everybody pays for one mans crime…this way they will all get on that kid’s case and maybe put him in his place so they stop getting shocked.

This could really work, and better yet you guys could start a similar thing in your town, and then you would get to shock children too.

Thanks for stopping by…I know I sure enjoyed it.

-Luke Snyder