I’m certain you are a good person, I know you mean well. You always drive around little animals on the street, careful not to run over a family pet on your way home from the office. You occasionally put out clothes for the disabled veterans when the post office sends out its reminders. You’ve even gone to church, usually on a holiday, sometimes you even put a little money on that plate with the fake velvet bottom, like throwing a penny into a wishing well. Its easier to be good than evil anyways. Yeah, you are a good person. And you vote! Oh my yes, you vote. You’ve voted republican when your pocketbook was full, democrat when your bills were piling high. You claimed you saw a change in the world, always after the lever had been pulled and the sheets drawn back. At least, you did the first few times you voted. After then it was more or less a duty… all the people on the nightly news were voting, and they were showing off their stickers, and you just had to have one of the stickers. Strangely enough, you always found yourself voting more or less at random by the time you got to the end of the ballot. Why don’t they just make these things shorter? You’d ask yourself, staring at the ballot as it neared the end of the second page. And who are these people anyway? It didn’t matter, all that really matters is the first couple of names, or so you’d think, pressing straight on down that party line. Its easier to assume that the politicians know what’s best for us. Same with the clergy, they have the whole God is good, God is love thing down pat. When you hear them go off on a rant, they have emotion and passion fueling them. Oh, it’s nice to get caught up in that emotion. It really is. When you think with your heart, you are always in the right! Movies. That’s where you learned that… in the movies! There is always a happy ending, there is always a hero to come in at the darkest moment, who will somehow save the day. And when you watch those movies, you get caught up in that emotion, and you feel it sweep over you, that warm fuzzy blanket of happy thoughts that shut out the cold, strange world outside. Then there’s the television. The television knows everything. In fact, if it is worth seeing, if it is worth knowing, it will be on the television. Everybody knows that. Television is our greatest natural resource. If anything is going to happen, somebody is ready to film it, save it for the future generations. Even our mistakes, even the things that we now believe are evil, were filmed for prosperity. Especially wars. Wars are good television. It is so nice to be able to watch bombs and death and bleeding bodies from the privacy of your home, so that you will be able to cluck about it at the office in the morning. It’s a relief to know that the war isn’t here, where we are all nicely civilized with our television and our politicians who make sure that we know what’s really going on. In fact, someday, and you’ve been thinking about this for almost a week now, someday you might even donate a few dollars to a refugee relief fund. Its like putting money in a collection plate at church, you’ll send a prayer with the money so that the money is more effective. Your heart tells you that that is the right thing to do. And you always feel better about yourself when you do things from your heart. Just like the priests say you should feel. This Piece published by the Rambler!
