The Cynic Express(ed) 3.08: Projection for Profit

     The suitably tragic and slightly lurid story of the lawsuit against the Hatboro-Horsham School District in Pennsylvania reads like the tabloids used to and like the staid papers of our forefathers do these days. It seems a young lady, like an unfortunate number of young ladies do, found herself in that motherly way at the age of sixteen. The news reports and, I assume, any and all related court documents, do not cover the interpersonal dynamics of why the young lady did not feel she could broach this problem with her concerned and understanding parents. Instead, she turned to a guidance counselor at her high school. The counselor took a proactive role in helping the young lady solve her problem. He counseled her, helped her plan an abortion, and even cashed checks written by the young lady's accomplice, soul mate, and/or plaything so that she could have the requisite funds for when she drove over state lines to get a clandestine abortion.

     Unfortunately, as with the best laid plans of young ladies and men, everything went awry. The parents discovered evidence of their little angel's trip to New Jersey. Upon a sensitive and delicate conversation that only a hardened cynic could imagine to be a hysterical, shrieking interrogation, the parents discovered the snarl of lies and deceit that led to the young lady's abortion. As the sympathetic parents, they did the only humane thing: they sued.

     They did not call the school officials, complain, hound William Hickey, the aforementioned counselor, out of his job and cast him from their town. Maybe that's too community-minded. They didn't want to remove a controversial member of the school staff. They didn't want to make the entire township a better place where the babies can have babies. A nice, white picketed prison where no misdirected but caring counselor could explain, after the birds have crapped and the bees have stung the facts of life onto the adolescents, options the adolescents have. No, Besides the warm glow the parent might get from yanking out the bleeding-womb liberals in their schools, there's no payoff in it for the parents. Nah, just sue them. Not just the counselor-we know what sort of living a school official earns, and you won't buy a Lexus from that tort jackpot. Better include the whole school district; that way the litigious parents of the libidinous kid can suck their new, improved lifestyle from the taxes of their neighbors.

     The Philadelphia Inquirer reports what a great calamity this lawsuit represents for the bond of trust between guidance counselors and teenagers, how the impressionable young people will no longer be able to go to their school staff with problems like unwanted pregnancies and hear about alternatives like abortion. Of course, nobody else raises an eyebrow at the lawsuit itself. Litigation is par for the course in the decade of the nineties and in the impending decade of the oh-ohs.

     Maybe I am just cynical, but work with me as I try to get into the spirit. Mom, Dad, why stop your lawsuits there? After all, I think you might have a good case against little Johnny for Wrongful Impregnation. Once you have empowered yourself to recognize that you have not erred as parents, bringing quiet shame upon your family, but you have been victims of a corrupt system. A corrupt, oppressive, and unspecified-damages-for-mental-anguish-causing system where two misguided sixteen-year-olds have intercourse without prophylactics you would not allow the schools to distribute. A system where someone outside your dysfunctional family has tried to roll up his or her sleeves, interact with your kids, and try to do his or her best in a hostile work environment to clean up your mess. Poor little you. Once you're seething red in that self-wrongtious snit, nothing should stand in your way, not even Reason.

     Hickey, on the other hand, has every right to countersue. After all, he has saved you from decades of birthday presents, a college education that, in eighteen years, would have cost something like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and he has upgraded you from the Quiet Desperation most people fly in to the special luxury Loud Desperation class. That should be worth unspecified damages, too.

     When all's said, attested to under oath, and appealed to the highest court, the nation will have a precedent. Projection for profit.