Save the children. Right!

A few days ago I blogged about the case of Julie Amero a substitute teacher in Connecticut. She says she was on the school computer in the classroom viewing a web page on hair styling when there was an explosion of pop-ups with sexual images. She said the more she tried to stop them the more they appeared. Millions and millions of people have experienced the same thing.

But some of Julie’s students saw the images and she was prosecuted with four counts of risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child. For this she faces up to 40 years in prison. It is believed that maybe 10 students saw these images which they described as “naked men and women”.

Now this got my imagination working overtime -- the prosecution not the naked images. Obviously the prosecutor, our Moron of the Week, David Smith, no doubt had to paint a picture of how these students were horribly scarred by having glimpsed images of naked people.

He brought the students to court to testify what they saw but I doubt he spent any time asking them of the trauma they no doubt experienced. I was thinking of a little scene where these students are sitting in a room together waiting to testify. Mr. Smith is in the court room telling everyone how horrible it must have been for these students to have seen some nudity or worse -- they might have seen human copulation. God forbid!

As he pontificates on the destruction that this poor teacher inflicted accidentally on these students the pupils themselves are sitting around waiting to testify and chatting among themselves. Here is how I imagined it.

Billy yawns and turns to his schoolmate Ted who is sitting next to him. “Did you see that shit on the computer?”

“Sure I did”, Ted smiled, “but she pushed me away before I got to see much.” Now he frowned.

“Well, when she was pushing you away I got a pretty good look but it wasn’t easy,” bragged Billy.

“Hell, Billy, you sure were lucky” said Ted with a touch of envy in his voice.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Billy, “but it wasn’t that good.
My dad’s got better stuff than that in the garage.”

John who is sitting across from them pulls out his cellphone and accesses the internet with it. He smiles and hands it to Billy and Ted. The boys look down and smile. “Hey, that’s neat. I’ve seen that site. I downloaded some pictures from there and keep them on my hard drive,” said Ted. “I had to put them in a locked file to keep my mom from finding them.”

Billy is really thrilled to hear about the collection. “Put them on CD for me and I’ll give you a CD of the stuff I’ve got.”

Ted looked a bit perturbed. Billy implored, “Why not? I’m your bud.”

“Yeah, sure but you never gave me back those copies of Playboy.”

“Oh, that, I, I, just forgot. I promise you I will. You could have said something. I just forgot is all. I’ll bring them back and lend you a few I sneaked out from my brother’s room. But I need to get them back next week or my brother will notice them missing. Every time he notices one gone he comes and gives me grief until I give it back.”

John leans over to them and has a suggestion: “Hey, you guys. Come for a sleep overthis weekend. We’ll sneak down to the TV room when my folks are asleep. We get the Playboy channel and I know the code to unlock the parental code.”

“How’d you get that?” asked Billy.

“Easy, I had to show my parents how to set it up. They couldn’t figure it out. Anyway that stuff is tame compared to some of the DVDs my folks have on the top shelf in the closet. They’ll be gone some on Saturday and we can watch those then.”

“Sounds great,” said Ted.

“I’m in,” said Billy. A court employee walked by the room and the boys sat back quietly. Down the hall the prosecution was talking about how those fleeting glimpses of nudity stripped these “innocent children” of their childhood. He pointed a skinny finger at the sad looking teacher and intoned about the trauma inflicted on the young by her carelessness. He implored the jury to find her guilty for the sake of the children. They complied.