I render my verdict. The entire population of the earth, except for myself and three other people, is hereby condemned to death.

I realize that the condemned may not recognize the formal authority of my court. I fully expect political, social, and religious leaders to protest; their whining about "due process" and "just cause" will certainly bring me no end of annoyance. Perhaps I could even take myself to task for adding the prefix "un-" to "fair trial." So allow me to make a case; allow me to present the evidence that leads me to the just and proper verdict. I am certain this sentence will meet with general approbation, considering I'll be killing off most of its critics in its execution.

When I first came to college, I was nervous about the roommate-matching process. In twenty years of life I have never been adept at separating the wheat of true friends from the chaff of time-wasting sacks of air. I had filled out the roommate-matching form, of course - gender, smoking or not, rating myself on scales of one to five on how neat, tidy, narcoleptic I was - but no one can encapsulate a person in numerical ratings. Self report is doomed to failure. Should a form include the question, "Are you a jerk?", few people will answer yes.

When freshman arrival day dawned I was understandably anxious. Not about living on my own - dear lord, I wanted that desperately, I needed to escape the tyranny of family. No - my concern was for with whom I would live the next year, with whom I would be sharing my escape - or plotting another one from! He had arrived before me, but I could not extract him from the horde of fraternity brothers . I appreciated their presence for the first and I think only time - they were helping freshman unload belongings and fill rooms - but with scores of males scrambling about in a narrow hall, I had no idea which one belonged to the other half of my room. I spent a few nervous minutes wondering who he was.

Exhibit A of the trial of mankind is my first roommate. Perhaps not every person is an idiot or a jerk. This court will even extend the benefit of the doubt to more than the three people spared from its sentence, though it pains me to admit to a shred of goodness in the hearts of those who commit atrocities on a daily basis. The counsel for the defense, my damned turncoat sense of logic and proportion, argues thusly: at heart many people are content to be themselves, go about their daily life, and not spit on anybody.

An average person is much like doorway. Sometimes the door is open, sometimes the door is closed. Sometimes an average person's actions interfere with my desires, or prevent me from acting in a manner I might wish, or otherwise infringe on my life. When asked politely, they'll graciously open - until a wind of circumstance slams them shut, or their closing mechanisms gradually restore them to their former ways.

My first roommate was an average person, an average doorway, much to my relief. Records submitted to this court confirm him as a computer science major, and as introverted (unpopular) as I was. We quickly formed a pact of mutual noninterference, a nonverbal, unwritten contract no less binding than a formal document. He stayed on his half; I stayed on mine. We shared TV, video game console, and games without permission asked or needed. The experience was much like sharing an office cubicle with a plant - give it a little water sometimes and it's happy - except I slept there instead of working there. All in all, a perfectly tolerable arrangement, and life was good - almost.

Lest I be considered biased, allow me to submit this: I try to consider myself an average person. I would like to be better, but I simply don't have the strength of will necessary to truly care and sympathize with other people, especially those whom I don't know. I only know three people capable of that: those who I have spared from my verdict. They are my friends, truly caring and wonderful people. They are my role models and my heroes. I wish I could be like them; I wish all people could be like them.
They know me better than I know myself; they force me to admit that I'm empathic to an extreme. I understand where people are coming from. I understand their positions, the thought processes that lie behind those positions, even a little of what may have led them to develop their positions. Sometimes I act on this knowledge; sometimes, when I feel frustrated, injured or assaulted - or just plain bitter about the world in general - I'll ignore that empathy. Admittedly, I've sentenced humanity to death, but rest assured that I reached that decision under careful consideration, in that I felt slightly more bitter than usual when I came to it. And so while life was almost good with my first roommate, he must nevertheless die as well. Almost only counts in horseshoes and atom bombs.

My roommate had one horrible problem - he snored. He snored loud enough to wake me from a deep sleep. He snored loudly enough to prevent me from going to sleep, often for hours on end. I have only heard one person snore louder - my mother, who has at times literally woken me up with what I thought to be the sounds of an imminent Apocalypse.
I ask you: how dare he disrupt my sleep? What right permits this imbecile to keep me awake, to grunt and snort and blubber throughout the night? How can he possibly be allowed to become sick, a condition he surely knew would exacerbate his situation? And what nerve - what unmitigated gall - permits him to be unaware and unaccountable of this heinous crime?

Clearly this damnable case is the worst of humanity. I feel confident that the prosecution - Rage, Fury, Intolerance & Assocs. - may rest their case without fear of loss. But yet they bring more to the stand!

Time came to pick rooms for the next semester, and again I had no recourse but random matching. I have never had a male friend I would want to live with, and having female roommates was impossible in a dorm room. In the end I picked a place that fit the parameters I was looking for, without regard for who would share it with me. I had no choice.

My use of the word "idiot" differs from its dictionary definition, the quoting of which is too cliché for my tastes - let's just refer to it as "unintelligent." More properly I would use the insult "ignoramus." The idiot truly is ignorant, for he commits deeds that unintentionally bring harm or grief to others. He is an idiot, though, and not an ignoramus - for, if he stopped to think for one bare second, he would realize the harm he is doing. Kneejerk reactions and set patterns characterize the idiot, as does a failure to adapt, for commonly idiots believe in a very limited form of cause-and-effect. A driver speeds through a puddle to watch the splash, never realizing he's soaked a pedestrian; a co-worker empties the coffee pot and never thinks to make more. Idiots are everywhere, a part of daily life.

My second roommate was an idiot. He vaguely resembled a barrel with appendages. I don't think I ever found out what he was in college for, because he was never awake.
I can understand wanting to sleep. I can understand napping. I can understand a nocturnal lifestyle. But what I cannot understand is sleeping sixteen hours a day. I briefly considered medical conditions that might have necessitated that much sleep, but he clearly could and did survive and even thrive on less when the mood struck him. He seemed to sleep not out of a need to do so, but out of a total lack of anything else to do. I never saw him doing homework, for example, or even leaving the room. I imagine that lack of productivity resulted in his disappearance at semester's end.

I have an inactive lifestyle. I spend most of my time in front of my computer - watching TV, playing video games, writing, working on papers and documents for classes, communicating with my loved ones. The constraints imposed on me by someone who insisted on sleeping through the day were enormous. Out of courtesy, I had to refrain from music, phone calls, verbalizations. I was trapped in a claustrophobic room with a pair of headphones walling my senses in. In the end, it boiled down to this: because he had no life of his own, he constrained mine.

Does a greater height of discourtesy exist? What control has any person over their fellow (aside from the authority to sentence humanity to a completely justified death)? What gives anyone the right to inflict such dire and inhumane torture upon another?

By mutual consent, we both shared a fridge and a microwave he had brought with him. When he disappeared over winter break he took them with him, and didn't bother to tell me even that he was going. I returned with an armload of goodies that needed refrigeration, and found nothing! How dare he? What gave him the right to take his property away?

At the time, one of my friends - a freshman named Nicole- found herself assigned to an off-campus apartment with a senior. A quiet girl, not prone to partying or late nights, Nicole and her roommate agreed that they would not have any friends over - especially male ones! - for the night. A few months after they first made that agreement she awoke one morning to discover a completely unfamiliar boy in her roommate's bed, which was in the same room as hers.

After having heard all the evidence, I do not believe that my roommate, or Nicole's roommate, intended inconvenience with their actions. Rather, they simply failed to think about how they would affect us. But ignorance of the law is not a defense under the law - blundering through a situation, causing damage and suffering left and right, cannot be excused by someone not bothering, not caring enough, or simply not thinking to think about what they are doing!

After a blissful semester of roommate-free living, and then summer popped up to spoil my fun. It brought Exhibit C in the parade of evidence against mankind - a creature on the pathetic side of the line between good and evil. I had crossed paths with him onlt briefly before, as he joined and then abandoned a gaming society I held membership in. In the course of room-hunting, he came across my name and my room; misinterpreting my minimal tolerance for his existence as friendship, signed up to live in it.

Jerks. Here this court must admit to bias, just as a war-crimes tribunal is biased against those who commit atrocities in conflict. I loathe people who consciously choose to make other people's lives miserable. Idiots can be understood, a little - but to consciously choose to inflict misery and unhappiness on others - that is a cold, cruel, unforgivable act.

The charges leveled against my roommate cannot be counted. Many nights he would order pizza, note down the exact time that he ordered it, and refuse to tip the deliveryperson if it was even a minute past the estimate - as if the deliveryperson was somehow responsible, or bound, by what the person on the phone had guessed! On other occasions, he calculated that he had enough money for the pizza, but not the tip, and so ordered anyway. He had the same daytime sleeping habits of my idiot roommate, supplemented by late-night (or early-morning) sessions of loud music and loud typing. The time span of a year, ordinarily 365¼ days, has never come so close to eternity.

Let the defense not say I endured what I could change; I fled dorm living after that, escaping into one of the last available off-campus apartments. For a while I thought bliss was within reach - I had a whole room to myself, in which to spread out, make myself truly at home, and enjoy life.

I thought my current roommates would be satisfactory - after all, we were living in separate rooms, what's the worst they could inflict upon me? Nevertheless, they have armed themselves with a potent weapon - noise. From bass beats to high volume conversation to plodding around the house in shoes composed entirely of granite, they manage to keep me awake at night, every night, till three in the morning or later.

Under this court's jurisdiction I must classify them as jerks, but in fact they are very much a separate breed of jerk when compared to my last roommate. My former roommate was pathetic and obnoxious. Most of his attempts to aggravate me were easily dismissed as worthless attempts. He focused solely on himself; that was what made him a jerk. My new roommates, on the other hand, made the deliberate choice to continue on the way they do - not because it benefits them, but simply because they choose to inflict pain.

The other night I stepped out of my room to ask them why they were having a loud conversation in the living room of our apartment at three in the morning. "Noise doesn't stop just because you want it to," one of them said. "This is college," the other one added. "People have lives."

Now, I have made it clear to them that I have to be up at eight in the morning, every morning, and as should be obvious by now, they have no jobs or pressing commitments. Given evidence of this nature, I truly have to say that people who don't work don't inherently understand what people really have to go through. In the end, they have a choice - to try to make the effort to understand or be considerate, or to choose to inflict pain.

All people have this choice. Jerks choose poorly; idiots fail to choose; average people choose inconsistently. In the end, people must choose to be a jerk - for petty cruelty and sadism are conscious acts. Or they can fail to choose at all, and become an idiot - and ignoring others' suffering is no less contemptible than actively embracing it. Perhaps such acts were once forgivable, but through sheer volume the human race has become irrevocably tainted. Society encourages jerks and coddles idiots. This court has had enough. Hence, punishment pronounced.

This court is well aware that executing the verdict will be difficult, but fear not. I have dutifully studied the many films of Jackie Chan, martial artist and film icon. With martial arts on my side, I should reasonably be able to take out six billion people by myself, at least if Hong Kong action movies are realistic guidelines. Should I manage to unlock secret shinobi powers in the course of my study, so much the better.

As for the three people I choose not to slay, their sentences are commuted to time served. After all, they're the friends of someone who has proposed to massacre everyone on the planet - they've already suffered enough.