...how many reasons do you need for today's gasoline prices? Just two, if you think about it. But most people won't. Think about it, that is.What we have here is a heterosexual entitlement problem. Not just any heterosexual, either, but a middle-to-upper class heterosexual privilege problem that promises to turn Ohio into the Atlantic's newest ocean side hot-spot in the next lifetime or so. Po' Straight Folk (PSF's) aren't in on this gig, so we get to throw this gauntlet down in what we fully intend to be the first major salvo in unabashed class warfare.
It takes my family of one approximately 1,000 gallons or less of water per month to perform all the household duties.. My sibling's family of four in the same town uses roughly 4,000 gallons. This is easy math. I love my niece and nephew as though they were my own....niece and nephew...which they are. But they are expensive little buggers. When their parents drive an hour each way in the over sized vehicle to watch them flail at over sized balls with over sized bats to over sized applause for their undersized results, their cost goes up. Children should be born with a Times Square-style ticker between their shoulder blades so we can keep track just how much each human costs to keep alive annually. When they croak - as we tend to do - we can rapidly gather all the data and decide whether we are headed in the right - or wrong - direction when it comes to managing the viability of the Only Planet That Will Sustain Us.
Al Gore calls this sort of awareness "Knowing One's Carbon Footprint". I think he'd get more press if he called it "The Real Cost of Pussy". I have clear memories of gasping in horror at the draconian Chinese limit of one kid per household. Should you lose count, we have an unfortunate, but highly reliable back-up Abacus. Even these third-world, isolated, communist, freedom squelching tyrants had a plan to deal with the cost and effect of living on this Big Blue Ball. They weren't thinking of holes in the Ozone Layer or melting glacial ice caps or erasing Australia from the World Map. They just saw widespread hunger and an unacceptable lack of toilet paper peeking around the corner.
Meanwhile, Fox News, Every Republican (don't lie -you know that is no generalization), Talk Radio, and paid shills from Reagan to Bush to Bush mocked the concerns as Junk Science and turned our attention to the horror of abortion and forced child abandonment and away from the reality that our resources are finite. They fiddled. The arctic burned - melted, really, The antarctic cracked. Oceans rose, temps inflated - everything junk scientists said they would. But, in the spirit of Republican Logic, we were introduced to the very first of the Bush Doctrines: Just Because Something Turns Out To Be True Doesn't Make It True.
We repeated that thought because Shawn Hannity told us to. We opened up to more improbable Bush doctrines - at the risk of permanently suspending disbelief. "Gay Marriage is a threat to The Family." Whose family? None we can name. We walked around the cul-de-sac - prime heterosexual nesting ground just casually wondering: If you could marry someone of the same gender tomorrow, which one of you would dump the other first? We got appropriate belly laughs from people who had already voted GW once and weren't even considering an alternative when given a second shot. We started developing some heterosexual theories of our own.
We spent a day at the largest university in the state a couple years back. We stopped average-looking people and the highly intelligent alike (Asians or white people with long hair and a doob stuck over their ear): If I hypothesized that lighting my clothes on fire would cause my clothes to burn, and then they did, in fact burn, would that make me right? Or wrong? I was amazed at the consistency of the responses I got. Even these sweet, fresh-faced, chain-smoking children were qualifying their answers with, "Depends...are you a Republican or a Democrat?" When I pointed to the Democrat tattoo on my forehead, they said, "OH. That would make you wrong."
So when I'm right, I'm wrong because I'm a Democrat? "You got it! " They lit up like they had broken the code on the final strand of the human genome. But wait. I had to know. Can I assume that if I were a Republican, I would be right under identical circumstances? "YES! YES! YES!," they shouted as they danced with Baptist modesty. And why would that be, I wondered? "Because you would be on the Lord's side!"
Let me get this straight, I said. 2+2=4.
"Not necessarily," the tall one said.
When is it not four?
"If you're a Democrat. Or if you have a purple heart."
What's a purple heart got to do with it?
"Absolutely nothing. But did you see what we got away with in '04?"
But those were bald faced lies. Isn't one of the Big Ten No No's
"Thou Shalt Not Lie"?
"That only applies to Democrats," I was informed. "Lying to keep
the Lord in power is never a sin."I had to admit, this shit was starting to make a little too much sense. I had to pull out the ace from my hole. "If each child born marches us that much faster toward the inevitable destruction of our entire existence, which has the greater sway: The several billion lives already here or the sanctity of the one that is still breathing amniotic fluid?"
I heard jack-booted footsteps coming up the stairs of the tenement we had squatted in for our session. Somehow I knew I had crossed that line that revealed me as immediately expendable. Not even John Walsh would take note of my sudden disappearance. I high-tailed it for the Gay Pride Parade where I bathed myself in the filth of reason turned upside down in the most logical of ways. A paradox that made sense on a genetic level. Bring me a garter, some spritz, and a dab of body butter. I had to wash off the heterosexuality before it started to fester like some bacterially-resistant strain of e-coli.
And bartender... don't be coy about that martini.
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