Sun 23 Jul 2006
In my weekly dissertation writers’ this-is-so-not-group-therapy group, the issue of guilt has come up in the last few sessions. A day spent farting around on the internet, cleaning your bathroom grout, and organizing your kitchen cupboards because you just can’t bring yourself to strap down to a word processor and write your dissertation can cause serious feelings of guilt in many a doctoral candidate. The question we debated was whether such feelings were justified or counter-productive: I think that in measured doses, a little guilt can do everyone some good. If you never feel guilty about wasting good research time, you’ll never graduate, right? Of course, having been raised Catholic, I find guilt is just as natural an ingredient to starting the day as a cup of coffee. And while guilt in moderation can be an excellent and healthy motivator, I know I take it to unhealthy extremes the way I live my life in fear of not saving the world from some kind of armageddon and therefore being a complete waste of all the love, support, potential, and top-dollar education that has been poured into me over the years. Fun goal, huh?
So I can hardly imagine what kind of miserable lives the children of Bush’s GOP science-hating sock puppets are going to lead now that the President has yoked them to an unbearable burden: “These boys and girls are not spare parts,” says Dr. President. With one fell swoop of his dusty, unused veto stamp, Dr. President has both saved humanity from curing itself of congenital diseases and relegated 90 percent of these frozen shake-and-bake “lives” to “death” in LANDFILLS. But what of the horrible fate that will befall the 10 percent that have the misfortune of being thawed out and adopted?
What is this? Another D on your algebra test! I suppose you were just too busy “hanging out” with your little skateboarding friends to study again, huh? Playing with your little Gameboy was just too important. Do you have the highest score in the school now, huh? Well that’s just fine. Go ahead, waste your life playing around and amount to nothing if you want to. God forgive me, when I just think about all the people out there today who we made sure got Parkinson’s Disease so that you could have the blessed opportunity to hang out all night smoking the reefer with your good-for-nothing friends! That’s just fine! Oh no, go on, go out and skate off into uselessness with your homies, as long as you come home occasionally to wipe the drool off my chin and change my diaper when I’ve got Alzheimer’s, that’ll be almost as good as if we’d used your stem cells for something valuable instead. But before you go, come talk to your grandfather on the phone, I just can’t bear to tell him myself that we can’t do anything for his Hodgkin’s because little Tommy had to grow up and be a BUM! A BUM I TELL YOU!
Well how on earth are these poor kids not going to be problem children by the time they’re in high school, what with all the psychological abuse they’ll have been through on the playground all their lives? God forbid anyone recognize them from Dr. President’s staged photo op, or they’ll never hear the end of it. I thought my nickname was ripe for colorful taunts, but just imagine the trauma of going through life as “TV dinner Danny,” “Peter petri dish,” “Microwaved Michael,” or “You’re the unwanted leftovers of some nameless guy who masturbated into a cup Yuri?” Okay, so they don’t all just roll off the tongue, but you get the picture.
“They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research,” he says. Thank you, Dr. President, for caring so much about my family that you’ll send thousands of children off to die to protect us from “terr’r,” but you absolutely won’t tolerate the sacrifices of the decaying stem cells sent to the dumpsters of fertility clinics everywhere to protect us from other painful, unforgiving deaths. How on earth does this man balance the sacrifice of so many “beautiful lives” under bombs and bullets and other swords of “righteousness” against protecting a bunch of zygote popsicles just long enough to throw them out with the garbage? Oh, right: he ignores reality and waits for Jesus to whisper in his ear. Gotcha.
If anyone knows how to get the names of those puppets in the picture, you just pipe right on up here. I sure hope that when I’m wasting away in a home and can’t remember my own family’s names, one of those little bastards has at least gone through nursing school and will think of the value of their life when they come bring me my insulin injections.
