WARNING: You may find the image of teenage kids rebelling against the establishment by playing backyard baseball with heavy metal rock blaring in the background either pathetically cute or appallingly endearing.

Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come "BACK before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious hours in the summer sun," the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, wrote in an editorial in support of the youths on Wednesday.

The regular players, mostly high school boys but including Tara Currivan, 15 (who swings a mean bat and brings lemonade to the field), and Scott Atkinson, 13, seem a little befuddled by the whole thing.

"They think we're a cult," said Jeff Currivan, 17. "People think we should be home playing 'Grand Theft Auto.' "

And they seem to get the fact that many adults are taken with the idea of kids' doing something that's not structured, not organized and not oriented toward improving your SAT scores.

"It's just old-fashioned fun," said Vincent Provenzano. "We did it on our own. Maybe people think that's unusual."

I don't even know how to start with this one.

The New York Times reported about a brouhaha in Connecticut over a case of wiffle baseball. You see, the Connecticutians in the story are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore because teenagers in the neighborhood took over a city-owned lot (aided and abetted by a couple of parents, mind you), cleaned it up and turned it into a backyard baseball playground.

Yes, this is a case of neighbors yelling, "get off my lawn" to a group of clean-cut punks who want to have some clean-cut fun in walking distance and within their own neighborhood. They are actually complaining about the potential loss in property values or risk of liability by having kids and teenagers playing safely in a rescued abandoned lot in their own neighborhood.

And what kills me is the comment by the 17 year-old: That the adults would rather have them zombified in front of a computer game than seeing them out and about playing backyard baseball.

Am appalled by this, especially after writing about the incredible hardship the Uganda Skateboarders' Association went through to make a simple ramp out of mud in one of their poverty stricken suburbs. Compare that to this suburb in Connecticut and ... ugh. All am left with is a sigh.

Sigh.