Gang Fail

The other day, Angel #2 said they were talking in one of her classes about gangs. Then she said that one of the girls in her class said that her mother told her that if they were still living in town, she'd probably belong to a gang by now. The town her mother was talking about, is our town, a town of about 1200 people, where the biggest business is the Co-op. The kids were all laughing, wondering how come none of them had seen the town gang yet. Then, yesterday, I was playing around on YouTube and did a search on our town. Besides the usual clips from high school football games and an advertisement for the feed mill, I saw a music video apparently made by some local teens. It was your typical rapper video, complete with guys slouching around in hoodies, wandering the dark streets. They were doing their own singing, which was atrocious, but I wasn't really listening to the words. I sent the link to the kids, jokingly telling them that I found evidence of the town gang. The kids watched it and were laughing their butts off. They knew all the boys in the video and it was for a class project. If I had listened closely to the words, I would have heard them rapping about a potato famine. The main singer and leader of the 'gang' won the good citizenship award last year. I guess that's the kind of gangs you find in a small farming community. Ironically, the same day I found the gang video, I was reading the local paper from where we lived in Hawaii. The high school campus our kids would have been on if we hadn't moved, went into emergency lock down twice on Tuesday, once when a man armed with a knife came onto the campus to sell drugs, had to be apprehended by the security guards and held until the cops came. The second time a few hours later when there was a fight on campus and a whole bunch of kids went off school grounds to get in on the action. I'll take our potato famine gang over that garbage any day. I think we made a good move.