CHOICES

There are too many choices these days…

The odd thing was that it all began before the new and bright millennium,

when on the cusp four metallic birds dove angrily through the mirage and opened wide these yawning idols of fortune. Limping out of the rubble was a seven-headed, eyeless ogre that still clomps its discriminate jackboots across the land like a stampede of Frankenstein’s.

Have you made up your mind yet, kids?

Since then everyone’s acted like thoughtless robots; machines, machines that don’t blink when crushing flesh and bone and blood into useless screams. Moving nearer one another, they bled their single red of revenge like some Sci-Fi B movie without a star or a storyline but plenty of gloriously Goddamned and clanking machines that captivated the optical sense like children’s minds frightened by a late night tale of phantoms.

Well?

How I wish we could rewind this groaning film and replace the actors with dummies and the scenery with papier-Mâché structures and look back and laugh and say,

“O! But that was too damned funny!”

We’ve assembled many thousands of them; zombies, zombies instead of thoughtful, reasonable minds- and these androids are trampling over precious joy and empty homes and pleasure and reason. The unthinking horde is on the march to starve and rot. That which began in earnest, now moves unconsciously, bent on destroying themselves and every breathing thing.

You better decide quickly because it’s about to start!

The odd thing, I attest to you now, with the sight of this jutting death and suicide of dreams intermingled with the new hope that could well save us, that it is somehow more attractive, in an artistic, poetic, storybook sort of way. A grand epic; Beowulf for the new millineum; the sight of mindless drones falling all over themselves and upon the weapons they hold, tragically impaled without honor or any dash of dreams pursed upon their lips. Worshipping the rope slung over the tree limb, praising the guns and the indiscriminate bombs dispatched to resolve their empty ideals. Guns surrounding towns and centering their fire aimlessly amid the screams of mercy and Allah and child and then to find that the targets continue to move forward, unrelenting, not allowing the beasts to win, to exchange their god for another, their principals for compromise and not allowing their own burning flesh to deter them from earned sovereignty. Why would they move toward the guns? What in hell are they thinking? Could they still desire our mirage of freedom, our anesthetized land, and our dead god? We’re going to need some more ammo! Fire away, goddamn it! Aim for the head! (Enter a free spirited hero!)

Okay, kids, you have to make up your minds now!

Let’s mindlessly blow them all away! Fire at will! Send them to hell and back and back again! Push our honed blades into their living! Crush them with our mighty tanks and our five hundred pound bombs! Cut them in half with firepower never before witnessed! Flatten their children’s bones into the soil! Flatten the entire earth! You know, the way it was meant to be!

Are you sure that’s what you want?

We could tear away their unusual clothes; the veils, bandannas, loin cloths, robes and headdresses and push an ocean of stinking water into their dry, ungodly throats! Have their children watch as mother and father drown like rats plunging downward as if they were on a sinking ship! Don’t stop there! Line up the children and pitch them headlong into the godforsaken sea!

Okay! We’re ready now! We’ll take four large sodas, a box of those Milk-Dud thingy’s, two Gummy-Bears, a Snickers, four hot-dogs, one plain and the rest with relish and mustard, and your jumbo tub of extra butter popcorn!