City, we need to talk. Stop
antagonizing each other and try behaving like halfway decent people without
grudges. I get it. Most of you are incredibly old and frightened at the way
this country is progressing toward anarchy. Things are happening at an alarmingly
fast rate and you feel helpless.
Your ability to affect change is severely
muted by infirmity, muddled reason or stubbornness.
And the music the kids are
listening to these days!
If it’s not a blood-drinking Goth
vampire, it’s a half-naked slut belching incomprehensible lyrics to a house
beat sounding like a whooping crane farting “The Star Spangled Banner”.
You can’t relate to anyone younger
than you. You think the Democrats are socialist hippies who want to turn
America into a clothing optional commune where Jane Fonda reads excerpts from
“The Communist Manifesto” while Che Guevara look-alikes with goatees rape your
daughters with rolled up issues of Mother Jones magazine.
Those loud-mouth liberal teachers
are indoctrinating our children by teaching evolution, science and critical
thinking skills. God forbid they should force children to write the entire
Bible out longhand while flagellating themselves with a cat o’ nine tails.
You know: just like when you were
kids.
City, you’re just a throwback to a
dark, ugly chapter in this country’s history when ignorance was bliss and
oppression of minorities was business as usual.
You eke out your remaining days in
Florida condos, clutching your pain medication and howling at television,
grousing about arthritis, angina and senility.
City, you’re broken.
But it’s not your fault. It’s your
defense mechanism because you’re growing old.
It’s scary what’s happening to you.
You wish to rage against the dying of the light, to turn back the clock to a
time when America was the clean-shaven good guy with a firm handshake and
can-do smile. When America was decent, and just and moral. When the fiction
crammed into your head by Golden Age Hollywood filled you with promise and
passion.
Where are the Humphrey Bogarts,
Carey Grants and Jimmy Stewarts now?
Moldering in tombs and winking at
us from their preserved black and white cells where they eternally remind us of
the days when we fought Nazis, fed the poor and rolled up our sleeves because
we could.
Because it was the right thing to
do.
Back when we didn’t view
differences, but found similarities.
A time of generous millionaires and
glorified public service.
When the government wasn’t looked
upon as a plague of locusts.
When industry moved America and our
skyscrapers touched the heavens as our ideas touched the minds and hearts of
many around the world.
Back when you fell in love.
But now, as the years fell away,
you’re left old and broken, flustered at society’s lightspeed pace, at the
edges fraying and coming apart, of entropy and vice breaking everything apart.
Everything you built is unraveling
and you’re angry.
So you direct your rage toward
those you view as agents of America’s destruction:
Liberals.
Journalists.
Teachers.
Democrats.
Scientists.
Secularists.
Minorities.
You hate them with a nuclear
explosion-sized rage ball of hot white fire. If only they would go away, you’d
know America would be taken back. Control seized from the boogeymen destroying
this land.
Know what?
I don’t blame you, city.
You’re too old to remember what it
meant to stumble, to fail. You view failure as weakness, but it’s an integral
part of the human condition, for without the occasional screw up, we wouldn’t
learn.
Learning brings wisdom, and that
leads to making the correct decisions.
Nothing wimpy about that, city.
So if you continue to bleat and
prattle on about phantom threats to your liberty, of perceived secularists
vying to remove God from your life and country, I don’t mind.
You’re a cantankerous fogey who
lost the ability for compassion and social niceties, a gaggle of bitter old
mahjong-playing biddies, a flock of geriatric grumblers who despise what you
can’t comprehend.
You’re set in your ways, and that’s
cool. Nostalgia is your panacea, your miracle elixir.
So rave on, liver spots dappling your pasty flesh, bony fists shaking at an indifferent God. Froth and jibber at the dirty thugs running the government, the media, the entertainment industry. Blather like Clint Eastwood in a furniture store filled with empty chairs.
You're a bunch of Custers and this is your last stand. Fight your good fight despite change being an inevitable juggernaut. Push those boulders, Sysiphus. Push those boulders.
Of course I’ll get off your lawn,
city.
Don’t want any footprints marring
your Astroturf.
