The Axis of Idiocy
“Daniel, you can’t pee there. The cars can see you.”
His back was to me, silhouetted by a streetlamp that was surely illuminating his genitals for the passing drivers and their families.
“Huh?”
As he said it, he spun back toward me, a stream of pee following him like a moving sprinkler.
“Jesus Daniel, now I can see you!”
He was more than a little drunk. The kind of drunk where you beg your friend to pull over into an empty office parking lot so you can take a piss.
Daniel and I had been friends since the second grade so we knew each other very well but not so well that I wanted to see his penis and/or get placed with him on a sex offender list.
“Get in the car!”
He slid into the backseat, his thighs catching on a magazine my mom had left there. It read “D Day” in big white letters on a black background, with a small “75 years later” above it. Beneath that was a black and white photo of a soldier wading through waist high waves.
I looked back at him in the rear-view, thrown to see real tears coming down his cheeks.
“Man,” he said. “Those guys were heroes.”
When I was studying abroad in France, one weekend I took a train up to Normandy. I agree with Daniel- the men who stormed those beaches and scaled those cliffs under heavy fire were indeed heroes.
Many of them are buried there, in a cemetery with lush green grass, ocean views, and perfectly manicured bushes. God, the French are good at bushes.
When I visited, the guide told us there were over 9,000 graves. I looked out at row after row of crosses and, notably, a few Jewish stars.
They say freedom isn’t free. Frankly, I thought these men and others like them had paid in full and my freedom was guaranteed. Now, I’m not so sure.
America is threatened not only by the axis of evil, but also the axis of idiocy.
Idiocy in the form of shaming pediatric cancer patients at Sloan Kettering, throwing punches at the Museum of Tolerance, and charging Starbucks with crimes against humanity. Idiocy in the form of teens on Tik Tok siding with Bin Laden, a Vanderbilt protester calling the police over changing a tampon, and people in masks screaming “you can’t hide!”
Idiocy in the form of calling students who chant “Bomb Tel Aviv!” peace advocates, permitting them to don traffic vests and place their campuses under some sort of play time martial law, and capitulating to their mob rule by moving classes online.
Idiocy in the form of calling for the dissolution of one state on earth over moral grounds and not, say, the dissolution of governments that kill dissidents, recruit child soldiers, or bar women from going to school. Idiocy in the form of cheering on a repressive, Islamist terrorist organization in the name of human rights. Idiocy in the form of equating anything at all to tracking people down door to door by the millions and transporting them in cattle cars to industrialized killing camps.
And idiocy in the form of, through all this madness, insisting that the involvement of the most vilified people in the history of mankind is not impacting anyone’s judgment.
Why is all this behavior permissible? Personally, I think it is because people hate Jews. But it doesn’t matter why so much as the fact that the people who keep saying they want a violent revolution, are lauded by politicians and singers and movie stars, and have assembled an army of useful sheep, might just make good on their promise.
The biggest form of idiocy I see today, what I consider to be the true axis of idiocy, is the idiocy of those who are not alarmed.
Every society, at some point, fails. I was naïve to assume it was impossible for me to experience this. I thought I’d be drinking Mai Tais through a peaceful transfer of power every four to eight years until I died. Now…who knows?
Freedom isn’t free. America is obviously not perfect. But the story doesn’t always end with a girl on vacation in Normandy, equal under the law, entitled to vote in free and fair elections, Jewish, and just kind of bewildered that it all worked out so well. Who wouldn’t be grateful? They would have to be an idiot.