Nikki
New in Town
- Messages
- 16
- Location
- San Antonio TX
Yeah, I understand what you meant by pranks. When I was a kid, some of my friends would call up people and ask if they "were TP." (Either not toilet trained or a pregnant teenager.) Which was annoying, but otherwise harmless. Nobody I knew ever even "harassed" anyone- it was always random numbers pulled out of the phone book, not calling the same individual repeatedly on end. And still, everybody got in serious trouble for even doing the random thing.
This other thing isn't a prank, it's just cruel. No one I ever knew of would have called the authorities and tried to prank them about anything (even the TP joke). We grew up in a time when there was one emergency number and we all knew that tying it up for anything but an emergency was a big no-no. This was like a prank phone call on mega-steroids- it's bad enough to fake call an emergency number even with senseless jokes, but five times worse to pretend to be a missing child. It makes me really sad. I think booking those kids and letting them spend a little time at the police station was totally appropriate, although not nearly far enough (they should have to apologize to the family of the missing girl, in both writing and personally, as well as do some major volunteering preferably at a place that searches for missing children). It was totally heartless and I'm a bit disheartened to see anyone in the media say it is a prank and put it in a same category as calling a stranger and asking if their fridge was running. The 11-year old should have known better.
Seeing that story makes me add common decency to the list of vintage things that have disappeared in my lifetime. When my mother caught the Prince Albert prank we were punished immediately. None of the kids who pulled the pranks I was involved in would have thought to do something so malicious. Even at those young ages we would have known what was funny and what was just plain wrong. Should I also add a sense of right and wrong to the list of vintage things that disappeared in my lifetime? I sincerely hope not.