Do you ever go out in the morning to pick up the paper from the driveway or stop at a convenience store to buy a copy and pause for a second and think:
“Do I really want to know what this is going to tell me? Maybe I should just leave it here. That way it won’t be so scary.”
I mean, lately everything just seems to be mostly rotten, doesn’t it? Liquid bombs on airplanes, wars, Darfur, serial killers, the way your butt looks in those pants. Sometimes it all just seems a bit bleak, doesn’t it?
But I know you can’t just put your head in the sand, and you have to be an informed citizen and all that.
And there are still the funnies and the crosswords and the coupons and non-scary stuff like that.
And there are funny or weird stories in the paper most days.
For instance, did you see that one the other day about the guy in Nebraska who has managed to get arrested something like 260 times for various crimes and misdemeanors? That was a dandy. Dude, don’t you think maybe it might be time to review your career path? Maybe talk to a guidance counselor or something?
So, full of hope, I pick the paper up off the driveway anyway and trudge back into the house and make coffee.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think I should get together a bunch of you people – ordinary people, to the extent that you guys are ordinary – and we would charter a plane and go flying around to all these various trouble spots, including those here at home, and just give everyone involved a Three Stooges dope slap. And tell them to shape up and act like normal people who have the sense that God gave a goose.
I mean, if a bunch of us all showed up at the Legislature or in Washington, D.C., or London or Tehran or Tel Aviv or wherever it is that little weirdo from North Korea lives, and we spread out and gave everyone on all sides of the problem a brisk dope slap and gave them all a good talking-to, don’t you think that might help?
A good talking-to like your mother probably gave you more than once.
That should fix things up, don’t you think?
And then we could bake cookies or some pies for everybody we had dope-slapped and chewed out and tell them we hoped they didn’t make us have to come back again.
Too simple? Maybe. Me, I’m thinking Nobel Peace Prize.
Reach Thompson at clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8612.
*Clay Thompson writes for The Arizona Republic. You can read his columns by going to www.azcentral.com
Clay Thompson 