Satire: A Potter-esque campus tragedy

Dear Child Protective Services,

I don’t know if you’re aware, but there are about 500 students in immediate danger. You aren’t doing anything about it, so I assumed you were unaware and/or willingly ignorant. Students are dropping faster than acid at a performance art exhibition, and I cannot stand by and watch more and more parents cry at the death of their children. Please go to Hogwarts and get those kids out of there.

The location itself is cause for alarm. Countless orphaned children are locked inside fenced compounds in the mountains without any outside supervision. The children are divided into four social hierarchies where they must constantly compete with each other to survive. On one side lies a dark forest filled with moody centaurs, and on the other side lies a lake filled with mermaids who, although they sound enticing, are actually scaly murderesses.

It also seems highly unsanitary that students are forced to live with such unsanitary animals. Just a few years ago there was a giant snake running among the pipes, and there is rumor of a three-headed dog drooling and defecating in the same room where children sleep. There’s a poor, chubby lad that is constantly picked up by his ears and thrown around by pixies. Are they at a zoo when they should be in school learning the lessons from Powerpoints?

Their sporting events are deadly, and the professors watch while eating their pumpkin pasties and laughing. Students are suspended hundreds of feet in the air in overly crowded boxes cheering and screaming while their peers zoom around without helmets as balls fly at their face. Just because the nurse can mend bones magically does not mean faculty should encourage students to break them. Also, just last year students were fighting dragons and risking their lives to win a giant cup full of fire from the very pits of hell where witchcraft spawns.

With all these dangers, what are the students actually learning – how to wave a stick? Most of the students don’t even know how to use their wand properly. A certain prodigy child has found himself in danger many a time and did not simply solve it by conjuring fire or lightning or some giant bunny out of a sorting hat. Why don’t we just buy our Muggle children guns and send them to school to learn how to use them? It’s the same principle.

The clearest evidence is from the school’s former students. Lord Voldemort himself attended this school and look where it got him. Without a nose. Do we want noseless adolescents to enter the work force, because no one will hire them. They could work in the kitchen, but house elves already have that covered. Speaking of house elves, the school employs slave labor. Hogwarts is on the brink of a civil war and I don’t want innocent children caught in the crossfire.

I know you will do the right thing and have an enchanting day.

Posted by Steve Holbert on Apr 16 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry