White America gets the Darwin Award

A correspondent writes:

This story, of course, has been in the news all weekend. Pretty blonde American teen abducted in Aruba. Her loss is very sad, and of course Americans should be able to travel anywhere, unmolested. That said, you wonder what kind of wisdom she was using, and her families for that matter. While I believe we should be unmolested where we travel, that doesn’t mean I’m going to travel by myself through Morocco or Afghanistan. Am I the only one who thinks there are some things wrong with this story, in terms of the teen’s and her parents’ judgment? No one has questioned them throughout this story.

Of course, Aruba is meant to be more a vacation paradise than the Third World shantytown it actually is. It has sometimes been said that the blondes of our race seem downright goofy at times. Her actions and those of her family seem to add evidence to this idea. From what I gather, this was a graduation gift to the teenagers from an Alabama high school, no doubt one of the wealthier suburbs of Birmingham. To me, the idea of sending a bunch of teens barely out of high school and apparently un-chaperoned to a Third World location, even if it is a vacation resort, is ludicrous.

That’s crazy enough, but her own reported actions are even more ding-batty:

“Earlier, police said Holloway was last seen leaving a club about three miles away in the capital, Oranjestad, about 1 a.m. and getting into a car with three local students.”

To wander off late in the evening, from a strange club in a strange land with three strange men (ahem, “three local students”), that didn’t strike her as a bad idea to begin with?

And these extravagant vacations for high school graduates strike me as very decadent (a word I don’t use lightly). When I graduated from high school, the parents didn’t foot the bill to send us off to the Caribbean, and unescorted. I went to a nice high school in the suburbs where many of the parents easily could have afforded these trips for their kids. The thought never occurred to anyone. They built a nice big tent for us where we had some non-alcoholic punch and listened to a DJ. Later on, some of us retired to one of the suburban beaches of Lake Michigan where somebody acquired a keg and bonfire was built. A few teens brought blankets and made out. That was about the extent of our high school graduation madness.

I replied:

On the face of it, this story seems no more worth analyzing than a story about a teenager who rides on the roof of a NYC subway car and gets his head knocked off. In other words, I would file this under “Darwin Prize.”

The problem, however, is that the suicidally stupid behavior in question is not that of a mentally defective individual, but of normal people, families, schools—of our entire society. It’s our entire society, it’s the white West as a whole, that deserves the Darwin Prize. And that’s news.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2005 01:25 PM | Send