A John Cena Heel Turn and a Graveyard of Shattered Dreams

Hey, you. Yeah, you. You with the ECW shirt and a stone cold can of beer.

You’re bored with PG era wrestling, aren’t you? Yeah, that shirt is from the ECW spinoff—hardcore Heyman fans have given up, died or worse, gotten married—and the drink tastes a little gingery, but you’re not demanding barbed wire and 40-foot skydives. You just want a bit of attitude.

And you want John Cena to turn heel, don’t you? You want him to stroll out and moon the crowd with, "You Can’t See Me" scrawled across his ass. You’d like to see him high-five Wade Barrett, stomp on Rey Mysterio and burn a massive pile of Sockos. Yeah, you’re tired of wrestling’s biggest villain being a guy who's akin to a sperm headbutting a red blood cell. You want some nastiness!

Well, hold up, because here’s something you might have forgotten: please, think of the children.

You’ve grown up knowing that wrestlers can switch from “good” to “bad” as easily as Afghan warlords, but these kids—young enough to wear CENATION tops without irony—have only known the highfalutin, oft-salutin’ superman.

They actually cried when the dude was forced to join the Nexus. They chant "never give up" as if he’ll say, "Ah, what the heck, I’ll go off-script for a change." They don’t know of Hogan joining nWo. They’ve yet to discover that humanity is rotten at its core. If the Champ rejects them, their poor, fragile worlds will smash like light bulbs, plunging them into a gloomy, nihilistic dark.

Would they ever trust a face again? Oh, sure, Mysterio seems like a decent guy, but who knows what evil could lurk behind that mask. Hell, would they ever trust their fellow men, leaders or gods? If a feller who inflicts pain for a living can betray us, anyone can!

So, the problem. Should Cena kick Barrett’s ass and save the innocence of youth, or kiss it and deliver a much-needed lesson in not trusting anybody, ever?

If Vince should choose the latter, we might see young fans weeping, spurning Raw and writing the kind of poetry that makes Sylvia Plath’s look like Hallmark messages.

If it’s the former, though, it might be—well—really boring. I think that we can trust him to make the profitable decision.