On training

From: Laurence Shandy
To: Dr. Edward Sondik, director, National Center for Health Statistics
Re: Teen sex

Dear Dr. Sondik,

America's sweetheart Laurence Shandy here. I recently read your reckless and telling statement in an Associated Press article on the lowered teen sex rate. According to you and your cronies at the CDC, a nation where teens are refraining from sexual intercourse is a nation where the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies is significantly reduced. In your eyes, a land of pubescent prudes is a good thing. Even a healthy thing.

Obviously you bring a certain bias to the table in this debate. A man of your age and social bent has most likely spent his seed inside a vaginal cavity a time or two. This isn't to say you're a family man, or even a heterosexual. I won't make any political assumptions about you, sir. But even the gayest of my gay friends have impregnated one or two females by the time they hit fifty. There is only so much filtration in a Jacuzzi.

So, you probably come at this issue as a father -- as someone protective of his child's well-being. Perhaps even overprotective. I'll grant that a plague of genital warts, pussy discharge, and tract infections would not be the best thing for our public high school system. And I'll even go so far as to thank the lowered teen sex rate for saving one or two hotel janitors from fishing a dead baby out of a toilet after prom. But you're missing the bigger picture here!

Granted, it would seem like a good idea to not hand some Shi'a fundamentalist a gun and train him how to most effectively remove the head of his neighbor Sunni. But that's exactly what our nation's finest are doing in Iraq. You have to weigh the bad with the good, and there's no other way to train a robust and effective police force. What they do with that training is a risk, but don't you think it's a risk worth taking? How else can we win this thing, sir? Do you want us to lose?

It's the exact same situation over here in our own backseats and suburban homes. Teen sex is a training ground. It's insurance that when I find myself on assignment in some backward mid-American wasteland covering the opening of the world's largest Costco for some brain-dead editor at The Nation, that the nineteen-year-old trade school dropout I pick up at the local watering hole won't need written instructions in how to get me off. It's the very definition of the social contract. Were we to plunge into the dystopian world of sexless teenagers you so callously promote, where would that leave me and every other American who believes that barely legal shouldn't mean barely experienced?

Think about the implications of your words the next time you open your mouth, Dr. Sondik. In fact, it just might be the healthiest thing if you didn't speak at all.

Best wishes,
Laurence Shandy, gentleman