Kiddie Corral

Oh, Kid Nation. What a fabulously intriguing little social experiment you've turned out to be.

In case you're not familiar with the premise, CBS shipped a group of 40 kids ages 8-15 out to a run-down ghost town in the middle of nowhere, New Mexio. The idea: to see if kids can do as good as adults at building a community. The problem: they bascially tell the kids what to do and purposely impose common societal problems on them. For instance, they're broken up into "districts" (though, to the kids' credit, they don't segregate or ridicule other groups).

The newest challenge: establish religious service.

So can the kids do it better? Well, some of them insist that mixing christians and jews and muslims and hindus is a horrible idea. Some argue for a non-denominational spiritual service. A handful of athiests would rather just keep religion out of the town. Some bond with others with similar views (my personal favorite is the "Jew Crew").

The kicker though, is that when given the choice between a huge mini-golf course and a library of religious texts, the kids actually picked the library. The same group who groaned for two days when their council chose a microwave over a pizza party picked a library.

Kids do the darndest things.