What Kids Say About Current Affairs

Sadie is 9, she is sister to Wolf, 17.
Belle is 10, she is best friend to Sadie.
Neighbor Girl is 8, she says she’s best friend to Wolf now because Sadie gets mad at her too often.
Bean is 10, he is brother to Dora, 13; Will, 14; and Max, 17.

VICE: What’s going on in the world?
Neighbor Girl: Bad stuff.

Like what?
Violence.

What kind of violence?
Deadly violence.

Belle: Global warming. Poor polar bears and penguins!

Bean: BP is a jerk.

Dora: People are killing people and dying.

Max: Things seem to be slowing down. Less seems to be happening this year. Last year was more chaotic; this year’s more mellow.

Wolf: We’re not going to get killer solar flares after all.

Why not?
Wolf: Because our magnetic field and atmosphere are so thick, it’ll diffuse the flares as they pass through, and cause auroras.

What’s going on in America?
Bean: There’s a bunch of jerky presidents that may be elected.

Wolf: They’re cutting down lots of stuff. Medicaid and the postal service. Budget cuts.

Dora: Snooki’s pregnant.

Will: Useless details I don’t want to know about everything, everywhere.

What’s going on in school?
Belle: Pink slime. The lunch ladies think they can use it as meat for the kids. They think, “Score! We get free meat!”

What is it?
It’s like leftover liver and pig hoofs and meat shavings scraped off the floor.

Sadie: It has pneumonia.

Ammonia?
Yeah. Pneumonia.

Belle: As strawberry yogurt, it looks delicious.

Sadie: Seriously. We saw a picture of it going out a tube all swirly and pink, and it looked so lickable.

What’s going on in your social circles?
Dora: I don’t keep track of my friends and their social events. I have no idea.

Really? You don’t ask?
I don’t care.

Max: All her friends are stoned all the time.

Will: All her friends are dead.

Dora: Yeah, they get lost easily.

Belle: My dad and his fiancé are getting married!

Congratulations!
And J.R. keeps calling me names! He’ll say, “Ew!” “Not you!” And, “Run away! Run away!” every time he passes me.

Do you think he has a crush on you?
One time a teacher asked me that, and I almost lost my lunch.

Sadie: J.R.’s mean to everyone. One time, Rio was just walking, and he pushed her.

Did she fall?
No. But she could have.

Wolf: My friends are pretty happy, but one of them is pretty good at drama. Creating drama. My other friend didn’t make it to first base in kickball, and my friend who makes drama had an outburst.

In sympathy?
Yeah.

What’s going on in your head?
Belle: How much I hate J.R.!

Neighbor Girl: Violence. Creeper explosions. Zombies that teleport right behind you and they kill you.

Bean: Bows and arrows, knives, and similar sharp objects.

Dora: I’m trying to figure out how… never mind, never mind, too complicated. Universe things.

I’m interested in universe things.
Like how did things get created when… beyond the universe, before the first universe, the first thing from nothing, I think about that and then I fall asleep because it confuses me.

Will: In my head it’s pretty much like this: “Boop!” It’s just random noise.

What will be going on that isn’t yet?
I had a crazy idea yesterday. That ghosts are people who lived in the house before and they’re not dead, but time is in more than one place at a time. Overlapping. So ghosts aren’t rattling chains and haunting their killers…

They’re just living, and they don’t know they’re ghosts, because they’re not.
Exactly. So you could just walk around your house and make spooky noises and really freak out whoever’s in the same timeplace overlapped with you.

But what if someone builds an extension onto the house? How can people in the past and the present share one space when space evolves and changes?
That’s why you see figures floating in the woods outside your window… because they’re people in the future walking around in the extension they built, man! And that’s how ghosts walk through walls. The wall wasn’t there at one point.

That is so true.

Previously - What Kids Say Is Right