God help us
When the teacher told me as a boy that there is no god, I got pissed.
And scared.
I thought it meant the end of the world and that all that Bible crap about the Apocalypse was about to come true.
After all, didn’t the Russians have the A-Bomb with one with my name on it?
At least, I was smart enough to know I couldn’t escape annihilation by handing under my desk
Time and age taught me to accept the idea of “no god.”
After all, I could not prove the big guy actually existed.
Science had disproved long ago all those silly notions about us being at the center of the universe and everything spinning around the place where we stand.
But then the teacher took things too far by telling me that I looked up to heroes that weren’t really heroes at all.
Columbus really didn’t discover America.
The Civil War wasn’t really about freeing slaves
Custard was as big a mass murderer as Saddam
JFK killed Marylyn and her friends got even by kill him, his brother Bobby, and dumped brother Ted into the drink with that pregnant girl.
By then, of course, even people like me were starting to wake up to realize Nixon really was a crook; Reagan was really crazy, and George W. Bush did steal the election in 2000 like many people said.
I learned that nothing is perfect and America is just as crooked and unethical as any place else.
While we talk a lot of high brow stuff, about fair play, law and order, free trade, we mean all that for the other guy, not us, while we cheat on our taxes, run red lights and take no show jobs we don’t deserve.
Now a days people tell me the family is all wrong, that moms and dads do more damage to kids than helping them, that home shouldn’t have a boss and a father shouldn’t take a hand to a kid when he or she acts up.
Our kids should get anything they want, though we as taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to let other kids get what they need.
My wife gets liberation and demands a divorce, then tells me I got to pay for the privilege of setting me free, when all I fell is lonely and what I fear most is ending up in a nursing home with no one to visit me.
Of course, I always figured I would have a roof over my head and medication I needed since I’ve paid into social security all these years.
Now people say I got to go it on my own, paying this insurance company or that prescription drug company just so I have the medicines I need.
We’re not entitled to anything, our new government says.
Nobody in government should have to take care of us or make sure we don’t starve.
Sometimes I think all the government want is for people like me to shut up and die rather than retire, so we don’t get to collect anything at all.
Maybe I didn’t take any of that to heart – believing deep down that my government really still cared about people even when the president and his henchmen claimed it didn’t.
Then the hurricane hit and I saw many of the people in my nursing home die from drowning, each of them praying like children that the government would reach us in time.
We didn’t realize until later that government wasn’t coming to help us at all.
For me that was worse than any Russian bomb I ever imagined at a kid, because it wasn’t them doing it to us, it was us – my fellow Americans doing it to us, and a President who claimed he still believed in God.