Ready or Not

Top ten reasons it rules to be a teen in the United States (as opposed to elsewhere):

10. It’s unlikely you’ll end up being one of the 250 million children worldwide between the ages of four and fourteen who work a full-time job (unless you have parents like mine. The only reason they’re not making me work forty hours a week instead of six is because it’s against the law. Thank God).

9. Three hundred thousand kids a year are forced to serve as soldiers in armed combat by their governments or rebel insurgents. With guns, and everything (although, seriously, what government would give my sister Lucy a gun? She’d probably use it as a hair straightening iron).

8. Corporal punishment was abolished here ages ago, but in many countries today, it is still considered perfectly acceptable for teachers to cane children for tardiness or giving a wrong answer (although this would so cut down on the level of goofing off at Adams Prep, we might actually learn something for a change).

7. One hundred thirty million children in developing countries are not in primary school. The vast majority of them are girls (and as much as I hate school, I do realize it’s necessary. I mean, so you can, like, get a better job than one at Potomac Video. Because $6.75 an hour does NOT go that far).

6. In some parts of the Middle East and India, if you’re a girl who gets caught flirting with some dude you met at the mall or whatever, your male relatives can murder you and pretty much get away with it, because of the perception that you’ve disgraced their family (which basically means Lucy? Yeah, she would never have lived long enough to flunk the SATs if she lived in Saudi Arabia or wherever).

5. Instances of girls as young as seven being forced to marry are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where 82 million girls will end up married before the age of eighteen, whether they like it or not—most of them not (in the United States, this only happens in Utah. And maybe parts of, like, the Appalachians).

4. Globally, an estimated 12 million children under the age of five die every year, mostly of easily preventable causes. About 160 million children are malnourished (and not because they’re just eating Pop-Tarts all day like I would if I could get away with it).

3. In Singapore, you have to get a special license to chew gum in public. If you don’t have the license, and they catch you chewing gum, you can be publicly caned (although if people here in the United States had to get a license to chew gum, there would be a lot less cleaning up to do on the Metro).

2. In order to combat many of these rights abuses, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that seeks to address the particular human rights of children and to set minimum standards for the protection of their rights. There are only two countries standing in the way of the treaty being signed. One is Somalia.

The other is the United States.

Why? Because there’s a clause in the treaty that suggests that girl victims of international war crimes be offered birth control counseling, and the religious right in the United States doesn’t like that.

And the number-one reason it rules to be a teen in the United States:

1. Because this is still one of the few places on earth where you can mention how much something like the above sucks and not get thrown in jail for it.

Unless you’re Dauntra, I mean, and you mention it by pretending to be dead in the middle of the street.