The kooks are now talking about civil war.
Even the kooks at the coffee shop next to our city hall. War is coming in July, they say, because they read that on the Internet, the world’s largest bathroom stall, an endless wall of shadowy claims, allegations and innuendo to which the feeble-minded have no immunity.
We had home-grown kooks stopping by our municipal building when the Cheetoh-in-Chief was threatening to not move his lard-ass out of the White House, his local acolytes telling our town officials to look out, that everything was going to be different after Jan. 6.
In Washington, the patriots dressed in buffalo horns, threw a tantrum and went to jail.
Our country is possessed half by kooks who like to think they would burn the whole thing down and half by ninnies fretting too much about the other half’s deranged mutterings. The first half would never do it because their wives would kill them. The second half needs to worry about bigger threats, like baseball’s pitch clock and Taylor Swift’s taste in men.
To paraphrase what Jesus said of the poor, the kooks will always be with us. Most of these boys spend their days in jammies. As long as there’s an Internet, there’s a clubhouse where they can meet to rekindle their lunacy and fret about the microchips Uncle Sam implanted in their butts.
Other than keeping war toys out of their hands, we needn’t worry about them.
We need to go about our business, modeling the behavior of rational people who go to work each day, teach their kids to be respectful and spend Saturdays at the park, getting exercise and fresh air.
I do despair about my liberal friends, especially when they say things like they expect to see the apocalypse. Really? Earth has been here 4.5 billion years and the curtain is coming down on your watch?
Why such great expectations? If our species goes, the planet will evolve some new variety of monkey or cockroach or an exotic hybrid. Something will carry on. Which personally will have the same effect on you as your death. So get over yourselves.
Sometimes I wonder if our entire nation isn’t drunk on 100 years of television with an Internet chaser. We’re all too damned ready for something big to happen because we can’t wait to watch it on our phones.
It’s the same thing that happens to folks who watch too many horror movies and become convinced that murderous strangers in hockey masks are hiding under their beds. It just ain’t so.
I hitchhiked all over the country in the 1980s. People said I would be robbed, raped, killed or all three. In turned out that folks who picked me up bought me milkshakes and offered me money. Two strangers – one on a motorcycle and the other driving a tractor trailer – took me home and had their wives cook me dinner.
Living in a culture that profits on fear we become fearful, but that’s not the actual world we live in.
The other reason not to fear is that the U.S. military can see beyond the kooks who occasionally cheat their way into the White House.
Long before Jan. 6, the real soldiers over at the Pentagon, people who have seen death and revolution up close and know the difference between war’s grisly reality and the action-movie variety, decided they would not follow the Cheetoh-in-Chief into oblivion.
They decided their loyalty was to our nation. They are reasonable people looking forward to enjoying their pensions. They won’t give all that up so a couple old, rich, white guys can throw a tantrum that wrecks the nation.
So sleep well, friends. Celebrate your great normalcy. Get up in the morning and kiss your wife and whistle your way to work. This is still the USA and the kooks are still outnumbered. Don’t worry about their civil war. Most of the civil warriors couldn’t put on a decent garage sale.