This is an old post, but still pertinent since the Pumpkinhead President is sending troops into Chicago and other American cities, planning on making himself a king, and tearing down a third of the White House while the government is shut down.
When you are a writer, you look for conflict constantly. It is a fact of the writing life that stories need conflict to drive them forward, whether they are non-fiction reports, biographies, or histories, or they are fiction stories full of made-up people and made-up events. But we are in a time in history where the conflict in real life is hitting everywhere. No place, in reality, is safe.
What do I mean about there being no real-life safety?
Well, barring a technological magic bullet and a complete revolution in the way corrupt capitalists do politics, the Earth will probably become a lifeless hot rock more like the surface of the planet Venus than any kind of Edenic utopia. If the Republicans take back power next month, kiss goodbye the human race in any form but zoo animals in alien zoos on other worlds.
And Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in the head with a hammer because of Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney’s Neanderthal political practices. Men in camo and bullet-proof vests watch polling places to presumably threaten non-white, non-Trumpy voters. Republicans are probably out-voting Democrats, thus sealing our fate. Republicans choose profits for themselves over life on Earth.
I, of course, am no more safe than anybody else. In some ways, as a writer of fiction, I am less safe than the rest of you. My imagination gives me near prescience about the bad things that can happen to me. And I write fiction about love and forgiveness and a sense of community good in solving the chaotic conflicts of life, All you have to do is get naked, figuratively and in reality both, in order to combat the dangerous world around you. But, of course, it means you have no sort of armor at all to protect you from the wounds of life’s many predators.
This last week, I faced a predator like that, in the form of a marketing service wanting to make my book Catch a Falling Star available at a library conference in New Orleans. Of course, only for the slight fee of $850.00. Now, it goes without saying, I could really use exposure like this to help sell my books. But the price is far more than I would ever recoup from royalties. And the salesman tried to hurry my decision. He offered to talk to his manager about giving me three payment installments, a used-car-dealer tactic. And he urged me to sign up before he would give me a chance to google his company, his emails, and his Better-Business-Bureau rating. He had no mercy for the fact that his efforts to keep me talking caused me to have a coughing fit. I ended the ordeal by hanging up on him. I did not answer when he called me back.
The world is ending. I am living in a house that threatens to fall upon my head at any moment. And two book-marketing schemers have now contacted me, one to scam me out of my publishing rights, and another trying to get a lot of my money for very little real value.
How will this story end? I have yet to learn how the conflict will be resolved. But I know it will not be safe.
Catch a Falling Star 
Sincerest Apologizes, Mr. Mohamed
This picture is from Ahmed’s sister’s cell phone… I think.
Dear Ahmed Mohamed,
I am sorry that Texas is what it is. Land of the big white lie and home of the brave-if-you-don’t-confront-them-with-people-they-don’t-understand sort of cowboys. I am a veteran Texas teacher with a lot of English as a Second Language teaching experience. I am quite familiar with kids like you. You built something wonderful that worked and showed off your electrical engineering skills and your future promise as an inventor. It was a clock. And you wanted to show it to your engineering teacher… which you did. And he was impressed. But he told you not to show it to your other teachers for a very good reason. Some of them are white people. Some of them are Texas conservatives. And you had no way of knowing how they would see a Muslim kid with a strange wired-up device in his back pack. The rest of the world does not look at such things with the fearful eyes of a cowboy conservative, or automatically make the assumptions that were made. You see, these people love guns and shooting stuff with a deep abiding passion that they really can’t believe other people don’t share. It is an unfortunate feature of being a cowboy conservative that they are addicted to Bubba-thinking.
In case you forgot about what actually happened I have included some YouTube videos to refresh your memory.
Bubba-thinking allows cowboy conservatives to convince themselves that the solution to violence in schools and terrorist threats is a “good-guy with a gun”. They think that some clear-thinking hero-type (white guy) can make a correct assessment of a possible threat in a split second, and quickly react, taking out the threat with a well-placed shot that would never miss the intended target and do damage somewhere else, thus rendering the “bad-guy” (usually brown or black) sincerely executed without the need for an expensive trial that might only have let him walk away from his crime, or intended crime, a free but wiser (also living) man. Bubbas believe with the fervor of religion that “bad-guys” need to get what’s coming to them.
So, this is why they arrested you. To prevent you from killing innocent school children with your clock which might’ve somehow turned out to be a bomb, because you are from the same part of the world as those evil, icky ISIS guys that cut people’s heads off. They suspended you from school because, even though no bomb squad was called to diffuse your clock, and they soon learned that it was only a homemade clock, they were convinced that you were trying to scare people and become famous with a hoax bomb, the law they actually invoked to cover up their mistreatment of you.
I hope you are happy in your new school. I hope you appreciate that you have the last laugh in all of this because the notoriety and viral Facebook fame you have achieved will open more doors for you and take you to places far beyond the simple teacher’s approval you were seeking for your inventive talents. And I hope in your new school you will have fewer encounters with the Bubba-thinking of some Texas teachers.
Sincerely and with apologies,
Mickey
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Filed under commentary, humor, racial profiling
Tagged as Bubba thinking, commentary, cowboy conservatives, current events, humor, News, politics, racism, satire