The high school is suffering a plague of the worst kind. It’s an infection we’ve brought upon ourselves, and one we must all work to bring to an end. We’re referring, of course, to the virus that throttles our hallways: slow walking sickness.
Picture this: you’re trying to hustle from the Unified Arts building (UA) to the second floor of the main. You bound up the main stairwell, bang a right and stride confidently past the library…only to get stuck behind a line of the slow walking scourge.
Perhaps it’s a crowd of friends chatting and shuffling along, maybe it’s a random group of people who just decided to crawl to class. Their carelessness makes you late. There is no justice.
It’s time we put an end to this tyranny and the tardiness it precipitates. Such an extreme problem that haunts our halls demands that we look for answers in extreme places; the latest Stephen King movie, “The Long Walk,” may offer some guidance.
The film depicts a dystopian world, much like the dystopia our high school has become under the reign of the slow walkers. The protagonists of the film are people so desperate that they’re driven to enter a deadly contest: every participant must walk at a reasonable pace until they can’t any longer. No finish line, just one long walk. The last man left standing wins unimaginable riches. But the ones who slow down or stop walking face life-ending consequences.
Though the movie itself is stark, it perhaps offers a lesson to the feeble walkers who have taken control of the halls. In the movie, their sluggish walks would’ve been brought to a swift conclusion. It is time that students take a stand against slow walkers and loiterers alike. Use a strong voice to condemn the weak and slow walkers, and tell them to move their legs for the sake of every student late to class or simply trying to walk at a standard speed.
If you are walking slowly and hear an aggressive voice calling you out for your leisurely pace, don’t be surprised if you turn and make eye contact with our enraged faces. We will be the very first to enforce what we are calling a new age of “speed minimums” inspired by “The Long Walk.” Dip below the speed minimum only if you dare face our wrath and public humiliation.
The fate of the school hangs in the balance, teetering on the edge of becoming full of sticky, unlikable slugs. If we don’t act now, the high school will descend into a spiral of ever-aggravating slowness. Tardies will become commonplace; passing period will become never-ending. Walks that used to be a matter of two minutes will become twenty.
For the good of this respected institution, we call on all students to also be self-aware and pick up the pace. Don’t be selfish, but more importantly, don’t be slow. Keep walking, because at the high school, we’re all contestants in the long walk to class—and the clock is our executioner.
