Have you seen that giant raccoon? It’s ridiculous. It’s like the biggest raccoon ever. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, raccoons are dirty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for letting bunnies and squirrels run around to create the illusion of a sylvan wonderland, but one giant, slow, fat, dirty and tiny-footed raccoon does not a pastoral scene make.
Let me tell you what I know about raccoons: Sometimes they live in trees, sometimes they live in bushes, sometimes they hide in trashcans and sometimes people catch them and turn them into ugly hats. Now let me tell you what Wikipedia knows about raccoons: they live in loose groups, sometimes they are albino, there is a good chance that they are rabid, and get this, the reason they are found in Europe is because they escaped from fur farms. There is no way that anything that comes from a place with a name like that can be any good. No way.
I always say that the best way to know the true character of something is to watch some stuff about it on youtube. If you youtube raccoons you will come across three types: 1. raccoons eating stuff and being boring–unlike videos of cats eating stuff, which is adorable, 2. raccoons fighting things that are smaller than them and 3. raccoons stealing things. These videos are rarely entertaining but almost always infuriating.
Lawrence students have been victims of the Lawrence raccoon’s guerrilla tactics for many years. “It scuttled down the f***ing tree and scared the sh*t out of me,” says Junior Anna Hainze. “It was finals week freshman year and I was going to The Grill and that b**ch just scuttled down the tree, scared the sh*t out of me.” How rude!
The raccoon struck again on Anna’s birthday two years later. “We were smoking and I was chasing it all like ‘whap whap whap,'” Spencer Neitzel mused eloquently.
Friends, this raccoon is a fearless beast. I remember my first encounter with it as a lowly freshman, we stared each other down outside of the library. Eventually the raccoon moved along, but not without giving me an icy look of menace that I could only interpret as a threat.
Raccoons terrorize and annoy people all the time and nothing is being done about it! If there is anything or anybody who has benefited from liberal white guilt, it’s the raccoon. Just because it’s associated with nature preserves and Pocahontas, people keep giving raccoons chances they don’t deserve. Raccoons will steal just to steal, if you don’t believe me watch ‘raccoon steals floor mat’, irrefutable proof.
“Why is she writing this article?” you may be asking yourself. Too long has this silent foe of the Lawrence student body gone unnoticed. This article is a call to action. Not really, but it is some stuff I’ve been thinking about.
Raccoons!
