on petitions.

The Petition Incident, as with all junior high affairs big enough to be called Incidents, was all over and forgotten in the course of a week. This is that nature of middle school. Focusing too much attention on one happening distracts you from the next time when this time, your life really is over.

There was a cast of characters associated with The Petition Incident, a group of popular kids deemed so because of the sheer number of Incidents they found themselves involved in. The real founders of The Petition Incident were a couple of girls, only one a cheerleader in case you're keeping count.

These girls drew up a petition, a long and lengthy document that took up at least half of a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper torn from their best Five-Star notebook. You know, the thick stuff. They were not boycotting fur coats or expressing their outrage at the new trade policies of the time. This particular petition was against a person, no, a relationship between two people, in fact.

There were a pair of best friends, popular boys of course, neither of them cheerleaders or even football players. And these girls, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was not a good friendship these boys had, decided that one was a terrible and rotten influence on the other and that it was time for the madness to end. They passed this petition around, they might have even written it in pen for the effect, so that the rest of the seventh grade would sign, thereby ending this friendship so detrimental to a fellow's character.

I kid you not.

Eventually, this petition made its way to me, where I did something that most people that the petition found did not do.

I read the stupid thing before I signed anything.

I read it and was amazed at the outright stupidity, at the blantant insensitivity that could be contained in such a small space. And I did not sign it. And they urged me to sign it. They begged me to just hurry up and sign it without reading it. They didn't understand why I was being so pigheaded.

I was one of the few people who did not sign it. And as was inevitable, the petition found itself in the hands of its victim, the bad influence on the innocent fellow that was his best friend. It hurt his feelings, as should be expected. If someone took the trouble of writing out an attack of you and then had it signed by fifty of your classmates, remember that you are thirteen years old, would it not cut you deep?

The guy came up to me and personally thanked me for not signing it. The poor guy.

I came up with my own petition, to add to the debacle that was now officially The Petition Incident. I wrote the exact same petition, except that I claimed that chocolate milk was a poor influence on regular milk.

My petition did not get very far for a few reasons. For one, the week of The Petition Incident was over, and it was time to move on to some other Incident. For another, the seventh grade teachers had gotten together and banned petitions (There's something very unconstitutional about that one). Plus, I just don't think people got it. Anyway, I was amused.

And that's all that counts, right?