....reasons it rules to be a teen in the United States (as opposed to elsewhere):
10.It's unlikely you'll end up being one of the 250 million childern worldwide between the ages of 4 and 14 who work a full-time job.
9.Three hundred thousand kids a year are forced to serve as soldiers in armed combat by their governments or rebel insurgents. With guns and everything!
8.Corporal punishment was abolished here ages ago, but in many countries today, it is still considered perfectly acceptable for teachers to cane childern for tardiness or giving a wrong answer.
7.One hundred thirty million children in developing countries are not in primary school. The vast majority of them are girls (and as mush as I hate school I do realize it's necessary).
6.In some parts of the Middle East and India, if you're a girl who gets caught flirting with some dude you met at the mall or whatver, your male relatives can murder you and pretty much get away with it, because of the perception that you've disgraced their family.
5.Instances of girls as young as seven being forced to marry are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where 82 million girls will end up married before the ages of eighteen, whether they like it or not-most of them not (in the United States, this only happens in Utah. And maybe parts of, like, the Appalachians).
4.Globally, an estimated 12 million children under the age of five die every year, mostly of easily preventable causes. About 160 million children are malnourished (and not because they're just eating Pop-Tarts all day like i would if I couldget away with it).
3.In Singapore, you have to get a special license to chew gum inpublic. If you don't have the license, and they catch you chewing gum, youcan be publicly caned (although if people here in the U.S had to get a license to chew gum, there would be a lot less cleaning up to do).
2.In order to combat many of these rights abuses, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that seeks to addressthe particular human rights of children and to set minimum standards for the protection of their rights. There are only two countries standing in the way of that treaty being signed. One is Somalia. The other is the U.S. Why? Because there's a clause in the treaty that suggests that a girl victims of international war crimes be offered birth control counseling, and the religious right in the U.S doesn't like that. (i have no idea if thats true or not >.< wink
And the number-one reason it rules to be a teen in the United States:
1.Because this is still one of the few places on earth where you can mention how much something like the above sucks and not get thrown in jail for it.
mcdadais · Mon Jan 16, 2006 @ 11:18pm · 0 Comments |