Last Minute Idiot of the Year Entry

I give Farris Hassan "credit" for his idealism and thoughts of helping out others, but this is a dumb way to get there. It's summed up pretty well in the first paragraph of this AP article:

Maybe it was the time the taxi dumped him at the Iraq-Kuwait border, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert. Or when he drew a crowd at a Baghdad food stand after using an Arabic phrase book to order. Or the moment a Kuwaiti cab driver almost punched him in the face when he balked at the $100 fare. But at some point, Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida, realized that traveling to Iraq by himself was not the safest thing he could have done with his Christmas vacation.

Hi, my name is Farris. I am out of touch with reality, dangerously naive, and while we're at it, I'm pretty stupid.

Yep, as part of his "immersion journalism" class, he immersed himself in the middle of one of world's most volatile places. Hello? McFly? Are you there? Really, how stupid is this kid? The article contains such naive nuggets of gold like:

• "If they'd let me in from Kuwait, I probably would have died," he acknowledged. "That would have been a bad idea." (Oh really? And by a bad idea you mean in that you would have died, right? What was your first clue?)

• "And I'm like, 'Well, I should probably be going.' It was not a safe place. The way they were looking at me kind of freaked me out," he said. (You only NOW realiezed it's not a safe place?)

• Hassan accepted being turned over to authorities as the safest thing to do, but seemed to accept the idea more readily over time. (If I were one of the U.S. embassy forces, I would have slapped the back of his head and kept calling him an idiot for having had to use so many people to find this kid in the first place.)

• Farris Hassan says he thinks a trip to the Middle East is a healthy vacation compared with a trip to Colorado for holiday skiing. (You've got to be kidding me!)

• "You go to, like, the worst place in the world and things are terrible," he said. "When you go back home you have such a new appreciation for all the blessing you have there, and I'm just going to be, like, ecstatic for life." (Farris, how about your be ecstatic that you still have your life?)

• His mother, however, sees things differently. (I bet she does.)

• "I don't think I will ever leave him in the house alone again," she said. "He showed a lack of judgment." (Looks like it's time for some homeschooling.)