When you dress like a woman, make bad pop music, and get caught with cocaine after reporting a false burglary to the police, you don’t get to talk to kids as part of your community service. Your ass will be cleaning up garbage in the streets of New York. And if that’s what the courts decided for Boy George, maybe they should’ve considered a similar approach for Ron Artest.

As part of his community service sentence resulting from the brawl in The Palace, Artest talked to a group of kids yesterday. And I’ll get into exactly what he said in a minute, but really, that’s enough right there, isn’t it? They wanted Ron Artest to talk to kids. Listen, I love Ron Artest. I feel like deep down in there somewhere, there’s a good guy, and I have no doubts that he wanted to help these kids. But he’s not the guy you want giving out life lessons, okay? I’d trust him to find a cure for cancer before I’d trust him to stand before a group of kids and not slip up and say something goofy at least once.

Here’s a list of suggestions I’d have for Ron’s community service:

– Beat confessions out of the guys they caught with liquid explosives getting on a London plane.
– Swimming off the coast of Florida, wrestling any sharks that threaten beachgoers
– Stealing the gold medal if the United States happens to not win it at the upcoming World Basketball Championships
– Writing new theme songs for the Carolina Panthers and Tony Kornheiser’s segments on Monday Night Football
– Collecting Michael Jordan’s gambling debts

And if you really want to take advantage of his celebrity by trying to reach people, have him do some public service announcements. Something in a controlled atmosphere, where you’ve got an edit button and a script. Limit it to “drugs are bad” and “stay in school,” and Ron might be fine. And again, I love the guy, but you can’t tell him to speak extemporaneously and expect something good to come of it. Whoever thought this was a good idea just hasn’t been paying attention.

Anyway, Artest got in front of the kids yesterday and said of the brawl, “someone started trouble, and I ended it.” If he wants to defend his actions, fine. He’s wrong, but fine. But you can’t do it at that place, at that time. That’s just not something he should say, even if it’s accurate, which it isn’t. The trouble did not end when Ron Artest went manically into the stands. Had he chose not to, he’d just have been laying on the scorer’s table with some beer on his jersey. But he chose to go into the stands and escalate this thing like gasoline on a fire, to the point where people were suspended, injured, and incarcerated. Wet Jersey vs. Suspension / Injury / Incarceration. At what point on that night did Ron Artest end anything, other than the Pacers hopes for an Eastern Conference crown?

I can’t be mad at Artest, because there’s really no point. He doesn’t see things quite like the rest of us, and he’s probably never going to. This doesn’t surprise me from him. But whoever’s in charge of who does what for their community service… well, they need to do a better job of staying on their toes, or soon, we’re going to have Jayson Williams teaching gun safety classes.