I am feeling a little out of place....
18 December 2012
• Shelburne NS
by Mike
Each day my morning consists of getting up, doing my personal first parade, and then having coffee juice and toast in front of the TV watching the news. It’s a holdover from my days in service and I don’t know why I still do it as it is unlikely that any part of the Canadian Forces is going to be knocking at my door to get my input, but today I did notice one thing between all the gloom and doom. All the ads definitely seem slanted towards an aging demographic. The banks seem to be trying to get you to put a second mortgage on your home so that you can “live life to the fullest”, while you still can; or there are ads for shower stalls and bath tubs that will allow you, you decrepit old fart, to get in and out without doing a face plant on the tile floor. The ads are all modeled by really hot grey haired ladies that look like they could do a pole dance on the shower bar and hardly need assistance getting into and out of the tub. There are ads for early retirement and dozens of ads for depends diapers modeled by figure skaters that the announcer is careful to note “doesn’t need them” but which are totally unapparent to the viewer. Are they nuts?! I don’t care if you can’t see a diaper line on your cling form dress as soon as someone gets close enough to you they are going to get a whiff of sack full! I guess they must think that our brains are going along with the rest of our body functions once we get a little older.
The other thing that I am totally out of place with is this whole issue of gun control. Our US friends have to decide this for themselves of course, but what is the problem? How many other occurrences of gun violence have to play out before us on the news before an understanding comes. I know about the right to bear arms amendment and how important that is to a lot of people in the States, but don’t rights come with responsibilities? I mean you have a right to drive a car too, unless you do something to forfeit that right, and still both the vehicle and the driver need to be licensed. Why can’t the same philosophy apply to gun ownership? And why do private citizens need to own assault rifles? Do they have to fight their way to the supermarket every day? Are they organized in platoons and combat teams? No. I suspect they own them because they can and they look “cool” and they have seen them on TV and the movies. Perhaps this is the beginning of the apocalypse with a general atmosphere of lawlessness originating with combat weapons in the hands of private citizens in the US and spreading out across the world. Maybe we will all need assault rifles and be part of a neighbourhood combat team to be able to shop for groceries. Maybe health and government infrastructure will need to hire armed guards to protect them. Hang on a moment. Some of them already do! That must be it. We are experiencing the whimpering start up of the apocalypse and we simply are unaware of it. Remember. You heard it here first.
Comments