CSotD: ‘The first one can come anytime; after that, it takes nine months.’
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Zits is an odd mix of old-line jokes about messy bedrooms and giant backpacks and new gags reflecting how young people actually live.
Obviously, I wouldn't be featuring a messy bedroom gag here, which is not to say that kids today clean up their rooms. Some do, some don't, but it's not exactly a bottomless well of humor.
But, in our day, consarn it, even the teachers didn't show up for class with observable pregnancies.
When my 9th grade Latin teacher got pregnant, she disappeared at the holiday break and, in January, we had a newly minted teacher who was an abject failure as a teacher but, by golly, he wasn't knocked up, and that was the important thing.
Meanwhile, pregnant students were also disappeared down the dead-rabbit hole. They left school, there was a shotgun wedding and that was the end of their education. And, to be fair, given the opportunities for women at the time, a lot of girls weren't headed for college anyway.
But we did have one junior drop out just before National Honor Society induction, and we all knew that the timing was not co-incidental. She was a very high-scoring kid who would have won a boatload of scholarships, but, however else her goals had to change, she sure wasn't going to be awarded an NHS sash.
This did more to reinforce our feelings about the NHS advisors in particular than about unplanned pregnancies in general.
In my last two years of high school, the wall between puritanism and reality began to break down. I was Class of '67, but I'm sure it hit in different places at different times.
There was a controversy at the school board when, following a shotgun wedding, the husband/father stayed in school and, the next fall, went out for football. A substantial element of the community felt he shouldn't be allowed to play sports, in part because he was a sinner but in larger part because he ought to be heading to work to support his wife and child.
As compelling as that second argument was, the board came down in favor of minding its own damn business and letting the couple and their families sort out that kind of thing. A lot of people disagreed with his decision, but most, I think, agreed with the board's.
Along about that time, a girl got pregnant with the reported expectation of a marriage, only to find herself whisked away to the home of that mythical aunt who needs some help for a few months. She returned sans baby, sans wedding, and the gossips all nattered away. But, again, the vast majority of us — and certainly her contemporaries — didn't give a damn.
The big break in the pattern, however, came a few years later, when a former classmate, now in college, got pregnant and announced somewhat defiantly that she was not getting married and that she was not putting her child up for adoption, either.
That set the community on its ear, though most of them had learned long before not to stand in her path, and, if they didn't learn it earlier, they learned it now. She didn't mince words but she did mince a critic or two, and good for her.
I wondered then how many of my classmates, girls with broken dreams and missing babies, looked at her and wondered "what if?"
I wonder how many still do?
Here's the deal: I don't think that Jeremy and Sara are watching their classmate struggle for comfort in an armchair desk, or miss out on social events because she's too tired to participate, and thinking "Wow! That would be great!"
And I don't think they'll be envious of her need to line up babysitters and go home early and do all the things a young mother must and think "We should do that!"
I do, on the other hand, suspect that newspaper editors will be getting an earful from the busybodies, gossips and keepers of public morality, who think you can hide reality by not admitting its existence.
With all else that has changed, that hasn't.
Meanwhile, for a more direct discussion of how much things have changed for young women in the past 40 years, head on over to Stone Soup.
Nicely timed, by the way, with Alabama's victory over Oklahoma in the NCAA Softball Finals this week.
The world is a better place for having young women with pony tails stuck through the back of their ball caps, and I say that as the grandfather of a four-sport female high-school athlete who doesn't happen to wear ball caps very often but does sport a blonde pony tail.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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