TO BE YOUNG, WHITE, AND LIFTED

This MSNBC article confirms what should be obvious to every American today: if you ever go missing, you best be young, white, and female.

Whenever a Polly Klaas or a Jon Benet Ramsey is abducted, I know their names better than my own ATM pin code, due to ubiquitous media coverage and my inability to remember my ATM pin code. Their faces become more familiar to me than that of my Siamese twin.

I didn't pay much attention to the news coverage of Chandra Levy, Congressman Gary Condit's lover from Stockton. But I still saw her face on the news so many times that when I went for a walk -- to my bathroom or to pick up my remote control -- I would subconsciously check to see if I saw her (or Gary Condit) around.

Don't get me wrong: coverage is a good thing. I like living in a country that cares about missing children.

But the problem is that there are almost 100,000 adults or juveniles in the United States who are currently missing -- right now -- under circumstances that suggest kidnapping, abduction, or something more ominous. (There are almost a million missing persons total.)

Obviously, CNN can't occupy all 24 hours with information about every missing person.

After all, our media needs to cover important matters like Paris Hilton's loss of privacy or the fact that President Clinton slept on the floor so that President Bush could have the bed on their tsunami ex-presidents tour.

But why is the media so blatantly biased towards covering the missing young white girls? Are we, as a society, programmed to empathize more with the Elizabeth Smarts of the world, and less with the Randy Lee Williams (a missing black man) of the world?

Is it a coincidence that our highway's Amber Alert system for missing persons is also named after a young white girl?

Do we just not care about missing old men of color? Tell us, Winona Ryder!

So remember: if I vanish, tell the press that I am a:

• cute
• impressionable
• pink-wearing
• Barbie-doll-playing
• young
• white
• female
• virgin
• (who may have been forced by my kidnappers to look like a 31-year-old Asian male).

And should the story of my missing body ever follow insignificant, fluffy news -- like, for example, the fact that The White House is outsourcing torture by having the CIA send suspected terrorists to foreign countries for "interrogation" - tell Fox News that my training bra barely contained my budding womanhood when I entered the Miss Tween USA pageant.

Originally posted on The Pnut House