Honolulu Lite
A new study (do they ever end?) has found that teenagers who have their bodies pierced are also likely to have smoked, drunk alcohol, taken drugs, had sex, skipped school and gotten into fights, although not necessarily on the same day. A piercing new study
is full of holesThe study didn't say they probably didn't do all that on the same day. I just sort of assumed it. You do all that on the same day, you'd need a personal manager to keep you on schedule. ("Come on, Jimmy, finish the fight. You have crystal meth to smoke at 2 p.m., and we're squeezing in the sex before the beer bash at 3:45.")
All studies like this are stupid. There was a study that showed that. They're mainly stupid because they take one weird thing, like the consumption of martinis before breakfast, and make outlandish extrapolations, usually negative. You never will see a study that says that people who drink martinis before breakfast have a high probability of becoming Rhodes Scholars. Generally they'll say that anyone who drinks martinis before breakfast will end up living in a cardboard box and talking to inanimate objects. I'll bet there are tons of Rhodes Scholars who are morning tipplers. Bill Clinton didn't get his light bulb of a nose by eating yogurt and Honey Bunches of Oats.
So this new study says that teenagers who get their bodies pierced, other than their ears, are likely to be up to all kinds of no good. That's because it turns out that kids who drink, take drugs and are generally hooligans also have eyebrow piercings, navel rings and hardware attached in body parts we can't go into here.
That may be true. But just because bad kids get weird body piercings, it doesn't mean that all kids with body piercings are bad. It means that most kids with body piercings just want to APPEAR bad, or at least not different from everybody else. Just because A equals B, it doesn't mean B equals A. (Everybody take a break to figure out that last sentence and meet back here in five minutes.)
Author Truman Capote, while researching death row inmates for his book "In Cold Blood," discovered that convicted murders all had one thing in common: tattoos. The insinuation was that people don't kill people, people with tattoos kill people. Admittedly, this was well before tattoos became the rapidly dying fashion statement they are today, but even 40 years ago not all people with tattoos were murderers, even though all murderers had tattoos. The thousands of sailors of the 6th Fleet come to mind.
So if your son or daughter comes home looking like a human pin cushion, don't automatically think they are a few piercings away from knocking over gas stations.
Recent studies show that kids who wear pocket protectors and carry lots of pens usually become the armed robbers. Or at least owners of body-piercing shops.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com