The Plight of the Promless Cripple

Some institutions of oppression are so inherently heinous, so purposefully designed to prop up the ruling class that they cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

Two such institutions are slavery and proms. When it comes to proms I am an ardent abolitionist.

I am one of the many promless cripples. My high school was a state–operated boarding school for cripples, which I affectionately refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT). We didn’t have proms at SHIT, which is probably just as well. They probably would have been exceedingly lame affairs where we all put on a clean shirt, reported to the gym and hung around with the same cripples we hung around with every other day.

And I imagine most mainstreamed cripples who weren’t educated in a segregated compound like me are nonetheless still promless. Even if they went to schools that had proms they probably didn’t go because proms aren’t exactly freak-friendly zones. And cripples aren’t the only promless humans. I know there must also be millions of promless verts (which is short for verticals, which is cripple slang for people who can walk). They are promless by choice. They could’ve gone to prom but they chose not to because proms, they’ll say, are nothing more than a bourgeois rite of passage designed to reaffirm the supremacy of the jocks and cheerleaders and other elites. In other words, they couldn’t get a date.

But that’s okay. Being a promless cripple has served me well. It has sharpened my sense of justice by giving me a feeling of solidarity with the rejects of the world, those who have been callously left behind. It has taught me the importance of embracing one’s inner freak by renouncing false measuring sticks of self-worth. Fuck those meathead jocks and their meatheadocracy!

That’s why I’m worried that God has apparently told ex-quarterback Tim Tebow to dedicate himself to addressing the plight of promless cripples. Coming up soon is the second annual Night to Shine sponsored by Tebow’s foundation. This is a night where churches all over the world organize special “proms” for cripples only. And every cripple who shows up gets crowned king or queen.

But I’m worried that God is setting up poor Tebow for failure again, just like he did when he told him to be a pro quarterback. First, this is a classic case of trying to redeem the unredeemable. There’s no such thing as an egalitarian prom. It defeats the purpose. It’s an oxymoron. If a prom can’t be snobby and cliquish, what’s the point? Second, how can everybody be king or queen? Again, it defeats the purpose. A king is the guy who’s in charge of everything. A queen is the wife or daughter of the guy who’s in charge of everything. If everybody’s in charge of everything, that’s chaos!

Third, if Tebow succeeds in bringing about the extinction of promless cripples, he’ll be doing more harm than good. He’ll be delaying each of these cripples from experiencing that wonderful blast of liberating epiphany that comes when they say to themselves fuck those meathead jocks and their meatheadocracy! This is a formative moment in every cripple’s life.

Tebow would better serve cripples and the rest of humanity if he took a more litigious approach. His foundation should organize a team of lawyers to sue every prom and force them not only to admit every cripple but to crown a cripple the prom king and queen.

If that happened we wouldn’t have to worry about abolishing proms. They’d soon abolish themselves.



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