I’m a little behind in talking about this news item as it occurred last week, but a quote from this particular article was one I just had to comment on.

You’ve probably heard about it already, but in case you haven’t here’s the event in a nutshell. A 15 year-old boy in a St. Louis suburb was smacking himself in the head with his skateboard and boasting to his friends about how tough he was. To prove it he invited his friends to use his skateboard to take a whack at his head. One of his friends agreed to the dare and whacked him hard enough to fracture his skull which eventually led to his death a few days later. The friend has since been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Pretty standard stuff and no doubt a lawsuit will be filed against the skateboard manufacturer because they didn’t have a big warning label on their product proclaiming that kids should never invite their friends to hit them on the head with it. The quote in this article that prompted me to finally write about it was uttered by the boy’s school principal, Jeff Marion, with regards to counselors being available for grieving students:

“Obviously, we have a lot of students quite upset,” Marion said. “It’s just a shame. There’s no way to try to explain what happened or make sense of it.”

Sure there is: The kid was a dumbass who didn’t have enough brains to realize that being hit in the head with hard objects is bad for your health. Not that the kid who hit him is absolved of responsibility for his actions as it was pretty stupid to think it was OK to hit your friend with a hard object just cause he told you to. This whole escapade was stupid, but it wasn’t unexplainable nor was it senseless.  If nothing else, though, it at least serves as a good example of bad decision making.