Murder by Nostalgia: When Yearbooks Go Bad

What if I put a shotgun to your head and made you kill any five people from your high school class. Dropouts too, not just graduates, we aren't letting the screw ups and slackers skate. Nor the dorkmos that graduated early.

Kind of sick in the head, this proposition. But it also reveals much about the human psyche and race.

Let's assume for a moment that I'm not just a complete maniac. This is not a literal proposition, but rather an amusing theoretical.

Five people from your graduating class. You have to waste them. Who are your choices?

One other minor limitation. If anyone in your graduating class is actually a murderer, rapist, Dahmer protégé, or senior member of the Obama or Bush administration, you can't pick them. This is about who among the good, or at least not evil, that you would sacrifice.

Out of a group of worthy people, none inherently or overtly or obviously evil, which ones would you kill?

One of my failings is that I think macroscopically. I was never in the uber popular crowd that was the high school equivalent of movie stars or pro athletes. Rather, I was in the click just below them. Still popular, but not super-duper popular. The different attitudes of the super popular were always fascinating. Only a few seemed to appreciate how fortunate they were and were nice to the lesser people who hadn't drawn a royal flush in the genetic poker game. It always irritated me when the popular people were rude to the nerds and dweebs. It seemed like they should have been more compassionate to people who hadn't been born unusually smart, or unusually athletic, or unusually gorgeous. Or unusually anything.

That's one person I'd whack.

I remember a guy in high school who had an affair with a teacher. Not a hot teacher, which I can condone, but an ugly one. I'd off him just on principle. Especially because I'd always have to listen to their fights in the hallway when I skipped class. It was like Beverly Hills 90210 meets the Beverly Hillbillies.

Next on my list, the sicko that gets his jollies maiming and murdering animals. People killing each other I'm at ease with. That's been the primary human pastime for our entire history. But you have to truly be a turdburgler to get your rocks off abusing animals with a total absence of malice. Anyone who can maim dogs or torture itsy bitsy wittle bunny wabbits deserves to die.

Three down, two to go. See. This isn't as hard as it seems.

Number four is the rat. Nobody likes a rat. You don't have to be a mobster to despise them. Okay, if you see someone robbing a bank of mugging a nun or saving a Goldman Sachs employee from being dismembered, by all means report the crime. But normal high school fun is normal high school fun, and that little paste eating tool who has to rat out the guys that fill a cheer leader's locker with crickets gets it.

One left. Thought I'd have trouble coming up with five, but now that I'm down to my last selection, I actually am having trouble narrowing it down to just one. In fact, I can't. So four it will have to be. You should start going through your yearbook and deciding what people you'd off. But only as a theoretical exercise, not for realsies.