You’re at a convenience shack or a grocery barn or wherever Old Century-style place it is you go where you have wait in some kind of line to pay for stuff in person and talk to an actual check-out person who hasn’t been replaced by a machine that’s smarter than your college sophomore kid yet. You look around while you’re waiting for the one or more of the latter-day luddites in front of you to write a check instead of swiping a credit card because a) they don’t believe in the 21st century or b) they never heard of it. (I can think of no contemporary scenario more Chaplin-esque—maddening, hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time—that the one that contains the bit of dialogue that goes: Darn it, I can never find that pen, it’s the one I always use, I know its in my purse somewhere, I always keep it there, it was an anniversary present, you know. Oh, I hope I didn’t leave it someplace.)
Mixed in among the displays of designer kid’s candies that are more addictive than crack cocaine and tabloid periodicals that are worse for you mind than modeling glue, maybe right next to the cash register, you see a presentation that proudly features one of those old-oak-tree ribbon thingies with a logo you can’t quite read yet. It’s not the pink one that wants you to save the ta-tas, no, and it’s not the one that wants you to adopt pound puppies and kitties or have them neutered or clean up their poop or whatever—that one’s brown isn’t it? No, this is the yellow one, you can read what it says now: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
If you tack a dollar onto the tab for groceries or your beer or your giant box of Jujubes, “a portion” of it will go help our troops overseas who are protecting us and keeping us safe and are making all the sacrifices in our War on Evil while we sit at home and don’t make hardly any sacrifices at all. This particular come on promises to make sure every troop—that is, every troop who wants one, or asks for one, or fills out a ten page application form and writes a 500 word essay and then wins the drawing—will receive a gift on the next Christian holiday that he or she spends away from home that includes a personalized Hershey bar that reads “Go, Troops, Go!”
At this point, you hopefully ask yourself why, if we the taxpayers have ponied up over a trillion dollars for our woebegone wars in Iraq and the Bananastans, why should any of us pull another dollar out of our pocket to make sure our troops get a candy bar for Christmas? And gee, those tens or maybe hundreds of billions we poured into Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that disappeared like an old lady’s pen, wouldn’t they alone have bought a lifetime supply of personalized Christmas Hershey bars for just about every person in the world who celebrates Christmas and most of the ones who don’t as well?
And you hopefully want to scream when you fail to toss a buck into the pot when you check out and the cash register professional pouts and says, “Don’t you want to help the troops? The old lady who lost her pen did.”
Catch the rest tomorrow…
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