CAREFUL -- HE'S GOT A HAM SAMMICH!!!
Drop it and step away from the ham sandwich, sir!

Back in 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of the now infamous clock tower at the University of Texas and decided to start blowing people away. Thankfully, the police finally capped him. but prior to that, the cops tried negotiating.

COPS: You can't stay up there forever. You'll starve!
WHITMAN: No problem. I've got a high powered rifle and a ham sandwich!

Well, looks like some unnamed kid in Lewiston, Maine is already halfway to being just like Charles Whitman. But now the weapon of choice is just the ham sandwich.

It turns out that said unnamed kid decided to pull a prank on some moslem students at their local Middle School. This kid thought it would be funny to put a paper bag with a ham slice in it at the table where five Somali moslem kids were sitting. Not exactly the funniest (or smartest) thing ever done. One would think that a good ass chewin' would remedy the problem.

Ahh... but not so fast, crime stoppers. The Superintendent of Schools of Lewiston, Leon Levesque, has decided to treat this as a "hate incident". Superintendent Levesque has even decided to bring in the big guns for this one... The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence (feel free to tremble with fear at this point).

Both the school district and the CPHV are already formulating a "ham sandwich response plan". I hate it when ham goes bad.

Here some of the story from Maine's The Sun Journal;

A 14-year-old Somali boy, whose mother asked that his name not be published, said he was eating lunch with four other Somali students on April 11. He noticed many others in the cafeteria "standing up, looking at us." One boy came near, began laughing and threw a bag on the table while other students laughed and said, 'Good job.'

"We didn't know what was in this bag," the boy said. "One of my friends reached inside it. It was a big ham steak. There were five of us at the table, all Somali. It was intended for us." The boy said he looked up at students he thought were his friends. "I felt angered, offended."

He suddenly felt like he was alone. "At the school the next day, I didn't feel safe. I felt like everybody was against me. Before I felt like I fit in, and everything was normal."

He began to think white students didn't like him, and the act was their way of letting him know. On Thursday, several students came up to him and said, "Those guys who did it were jerks. I apologize for them, and I hope you feel better."

The boy said they did make him feel better. "But for the rest of my life when I remember middle school, this will pop up right away."

Cry me a river, mama's boy. Wan't my advice, kid? Suck it up. We all got picked on at one point or another back in our school days. How we deal with bullies is what builds character (or lack thereof). If someone placing a paper bag with a ham steak in it on your table is your biggest problem in life... you don't have a whole helluva lot to bitch about.

In fact, consider yourself pretty damn lucky. Having some middle school bully taunt you with a piece of ham there in warm, safe Lewiston, Maine... I'd say that sure beats the hell out of dodging bullets and/or starving to death back home in good ol' Mogadishu. Ya think?

But on second thought, I think I'll call The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence. After all, I've been subjected to non-Catholics eat meat right in front of me every Friday. And they KNOW that I observe meatless Fridays for religious resons!! Doesn't that qualify as a hate incident?