Speak Softly

I am always amazed at our genius as a species for willful self-destruction. Even if they could talk, I cannot imagine a lemur, or an ocelot or a wombat saying to another one, ‘here, hold my beer (or hookah/doobie) while I try this’ and yet there’s not a day goes by where shenanigans and $hit among our biped brethren aren't the order of the day.

It’s bad enough when it’s “kids” doing dopey deeds, but here’s a news item from not too far away from where I live that would cause me to shake my head in disbelief except when I do there’s a noise like a BB rolling around in a boxcar so I’ve stopped.

Michael White, you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law but quite frankly, based on this account, it is obvious to me you are dumber than a box of rocks. This is stupid stuff when you’re nineteen (I’m thinking of an Army mail clerk where I once worked, Rooster, who piloted his scooter into and through a military snack bar at lunch time) and is just flat-out idiotic and inexcusable at thirty-one. 

Of course, it was a Wal-Mart. How’d you like to have them as a client for your public relations firm as you struggle to up-market their image? How much lipstick can one pig take, right?  Every bad internet meme that has or will ever be made about congenital dumbness is set in a Wal-Mart and now we have Mister White and his motorized escapade.

I’m trying to imagine if White rode the motor scooter “erratically” into the store or found a motor scooter, ride-ready (so to speak) in housewares (?). I had no idea what an “air soft revolver” was (I don’t get out much anymore), so I googled it and am less than reassured by the search results. Not a lot of warm fuzzies from a description that tells me “they are built to look and feel like an actual revolver.”

Seriously? Why would that be a sales advantage he asked fearing he already knew the answer. Maybe malevolent is a better descriptive for Mr. White since it now seems to me that from any distance somebody brandishing one of those things might be pretty persuasive when soliciting a passer-by for her/his wallet/purse or watch. 

What was it Al Capone used to say? Oh yeah, “you can get more with kind words and a gun than you can with kind words alone.”

-bill kenny