What Shall We Do With The Criminally Immature?

As I just now wrote to Kate Coe, people like 47-year-old Lori Drew -- who created a MySpace teenage boy with the express purpose of "messing with" a 14-year-old girl named Megan Meier, a girl who, upon being cybertaunted by Drew, hung herself -- "should be fucking paraded into the street and have every word they typed that child shouted at them, repeatedly, for days, while they soil themselves and scrounge and are made to feel like the shitty, shitty human beings that they are."

Or maybe, this is not nearly harsh enough for Drew, who:

"[S]tated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

I watch the TV show Project Runway with my daughter (who, as I type this, is interviewing at Eugene Lang College), which means we are unfortunately sometimes assaulted with ads for a TV show called The Real Housewives of Orange County or some such. The ad last night was so sad, so desperate; a teenage son showing his mother a tattoo, the look in his eyes one of such loss, he had no idea what to do with his life, how to impress people, how to shock/get love from his mother, she lolling on a white couch with her boobs hanging out and her overinflated lips, and then, smashing a whipped cream something in another woman's face, and all this, for what? To perform? What kind of depravity, what poverty of the soul? I didn't know whether to scream or hit or set fire to these people or just feel so much fucking pity. And yes, Megan Meier did not need to engage with this "boy" online, and she did not need to hang herself; there are variables of what happened happening now by the thousands, and there will, thankfully, be a thousand different outcomes. But what fucking peabrain of an adult does this to a child? How is it possible to be 47 and to have progressed no further than your worst and most shallow ambitions of junior high?

Comments

[Zev]

I've read a bit about this incident, and it seems the neighbors have been reacting strongly to this, ostracizing them and worse. But not nearly enough punishment for these evil people.

[Jim Treacher]

I followed the link before I read the rest of your post, and the bit you quoted was the exact same part that made me stop in my tracks. And they still live down the street from this monster! If she did something like that to anyone I loved, I don't know how I could stop myself from burning down her house.

[eric]

I am surprised that this woman has not be hounded by the media and paparazzi. She should be held to the highest standards of shame society can throw on her.

[loot]

Well I think this is another story about how anti-depressants make people react unpredictably. Frankly, I think any parents who'd allow drugs like that are negligent. People and their quick-fix chemicals get no sympathy from me.

[david]

Clearly a case where the woman should stick her head in the strike zone and take one to the temple. Digusting. Plus, she knew the child was unstable. Are we still drawing and quartering people?

Lucky she's not in Sudan where angry Muslims are actually wielding huge blades and making a public outcry for the execution of an English teacher who let her kids name a stuff bear Mohammed. Ladies and gents: the star of our show .... religion!

[Zev]

Not execution, caning. Forty lashes. And I hear the nutjobs have pardoned her.

[Zev]

Whoops, my mistake. I hadn't yet read about the super-nutjobs who are calling for her death.

[Brett King]

I heard that MySpace could do more to stop false identities from posting but they refuse to do so.

[Amy Alkon]

I just don't know how you do that to a kid and go on all "business as usual."

[Zev]

A person who can do that is a person who can go on "business as usual." There's a self-regarding lump of coal where their heart should be.