John Montgomery Presents This Week's	November 6, 1999	Creep Logo by Alan Fraser
	Authorities in Ponder, Texas
	Write This Way To Jail!

These are damn dangerous times we live in. We got work place killings in Hawaii and Seattle. We got deadly cyclones in India. We got Egyptian airplanes falling out of the sky. We even got (conspiracy theorists please note!) European golfers killing Payne Stewart because the Americans acted like such pigs at the Ryder Cup. But forget about all that piddly stuff. There's a real threat to society raging in the youth of Ponder, Texas. You know what those degenerate kids are doing down there? Shooting each other? Shooting up? Shooting the moon? No! It's even more awful and insidious than you can imagine: They're writing scary stories!

This week, Christopher Beamon, a seventh-grader at Ponder High School, received a typical homework assignment from his English teacher, Mrs. Henry: write an imaginary Halloween story about being home alone in the dark and hearing noises. Chris did as he was told, writing a story in which his teacher and a few of his classmates end up dying in just such a situation. Here's an excerpt: "I thought it was a crook so I busted out with a 12 guage and Ismael busted out with 9 mm and we step off the porch and this bloody body droped down in front of us and scared us half to death and about 20 kids started cracking up and pissed me off so I shot Matt, Jake, and Ben started laughing so hard that I acssedently shot Mrs. Henry."

Chris could use some improvement in his spelling, grammar and punctuation, but he shows future web-site-writer potential in the areas of suspense, imagination and humor. Mrs. Henry gave Chris an "A," plus extra credit for reading it out loud in front of the class. A victory for the educational process, eh? Who says kids are worthless and illiterate? Well, the Ponder school administration and justice system, that's who. After some parents complained that Chris used real names in his story, Principal Chance Allen called the cops, who removed Chris from school. They hauled him into court in front of Denton County Juvenile Court Judge Darlene Whitten, who threw his 13-year-old ass into juvenile detention. Translation: Jail. Jail! Kids who bring guns to school don't even get thrown in jail.

Chris was incarcerated for five days until his lawyers and the media attention forced the DA to decide not to prosecute. He's home now, wondering what the hell happened to him, "I was supposed to write a horror story. I don't think I did anything wrong." School District Superintendent Byron Welch disagrees, saying, "I feel that our people did the right thing." County District Attorney Bruce Isaacks says, " The administrators there were legitimately concerned."

I'm concerned, too. My concern is that there's a bigger threat to our school children than guns and violence. That's the threat of trigger-happy, half-cocked, wild-eyed, knee-jerk authority figures whose hysterical overreaction and gross stupidity cause a 13-year-old to rot in jail for five days because he wrote scary story. Think Chris will ever write another story again? Think he'll ever try to excel at anything? Next week those morons will send him back to jail for reading a Harry Potter book.

You won't be surprised to hear that there's icing on this sad cake: Texas Governor and leading presidential candidate George W. Bush took time out from his debate-avoiding campaign to comment on the events in Ponder. The Compassionate Conservative had this to say: "We've instructed our school officials to take any threat to any child seriously.'' Here's some advice for any Texas student who wants to avoid going to jail: The next time you get an assignment to write a story, go snort a line of coke instead.