Sweet Innocence

"What's this world coming to?" Everyone asks. My mom. My grandma. My co-workers. Me.

What is this world coming to? I'm not sure, but I'm wondering if it's actually "coming to anything" or if things are just better publicized in today's 120 channel, 24-hour a day media blitz.

Of course, when I was a kid the idea of a school shooting was unthinkable. Or rather, it was thinkable only as the plot of a crazy cult movie that involved Christian Slater trying to blow up his school. It was a joke. No one could really do it, right? Watching Heathers in a post-Columbine world makes the grown-up in me shudder in revulsion as I wonder if that was where the kids got their ideas. How could the fun of a crazy '80s movie turn so deadly?

But are these things really new? Not exactly. The scale is bigger, but school violence has always been around. Forty years ago my mom witnessed a girl stab a bully to death at her bus stop. Yeah, you read that right. Forty years ago. What was the world coming to?

Then there's my own part in child-on-child violence.

I was a total nerd of a kid, a fact that became even more evident when I got my first chemistry set. The Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids were tossed aside in favor of fingerprint powder, test tubes and a microscope. Most of the time my best buddy Ron and I used our powers for good (even though his dad thought our fingerprint powder was cocaine and wanted to call the police. As if small-town ten-year-olds in 1984 even knew about cocaine), but there came a day when good wasn't good enough. It was time for evil. Dark, dreadful evil that we didn't even recognize as such.

You see, there was a bully in our neighborhood. He was a couple of years older than us and had no rules at home. He could roam the streets at will, terrorizing the younger kids from the back of his bright red BMX bike. He had a sling-shot and knew just how to aim--I can't even count the times I got hit with pieces of glass, BBs, rocks and whatever other projectiles were handy. Mornings at the bus stop were the worst. He'd grab any kids he could get a hold of and push them in front of oncoming cars. Looking back as an adult, I don't know why we didn't tell someone about this, but at the time we thought we didn't have any choice but to endure. He was bigger and meaner and tattle-tales just ended up with a fat, bloody lip or a black and blue eye.

So Ron and I hatched our little plan.

Murder.

Premeditated murder, even. Murder in the first degree. Murder punishable by death.

We were only ten years old. We both attended church every single Sunday, could quote reams of Bible verses, knew the Ten Commandments, received all sorts of citizenship awards at school and were considered by everyone we knew to be "good kids." Yet we were plotting murder.

Even though we had access to all the guns we could possibly want by virtue of my dad's hunting hobby and lack of gun safety concerns, we knew we couldn't shoot the neighborhood bully. We'd be caught for sure! We had to do something sneaky. Something no one would ever guess.

That's where the chemistry set came in.

We decided poison was our weapon of choice. We spent many an afternoon brewing up the perfect concoction of chemistry set chemicals (probably baking soda and vinegar) combined with spit and poison berries that grew on bushes around my house. My mom would watch us from the kitchen window and wave merrily, content in the knowledge that we were good kids having some good old-fashioned science fun. She would have given me the spanking of my life and then rushed me to a psychologist if she had only known the truth. Her darling daughter, the sweetheart of the family who berated her father for saying "damn," was mixing up a murder weapon.

Finally the big day arrived. We had a big glass full of fermented mud, mushed berries, chemicals and spit. We were going to do it. We were going to rid the neighborhood of the bully and celebrate with cakes baked in my Easy Bake oven.

Then we looked at each other and said, "you do it," in unison.

Our plan had a fatal flaw, you see. Who would deliver the poison to our victim? Who would dare approach the meanest kid west of the Mississippi and offer him up a tall glass of toxic mud?

Neither of us, that's who. Our murder plan failed miserably. We never even offered our special little treat to the bully. Instead we cooked our Easy Bake cakes and lamented the fact that we'd have to deal with the bully until we were grown-ups or until we stole a plane and could fly ourselves to the North Pole. The bully surely couldn't get us there!

And so our moment of evil was over with no harm done. No one was the wiser and we continued our little lives without any psychological interventions or time spent in juvie. The only lasting effect is a haunted feeling in my soul. If two super-sweet, smart, church-going kids could plan a killing, what's stopping other children from doing the same? What is the world coming to? Or what has it been? I'm not sure. All I know is that I don't want to be there when the good kids decide to take matters into their own hands.