We all have things that we wish for at one time or another. Unfortunately we also all know that most of our wishes do not come true. But that does not mean we have to stop wishing, dreaming, or hoping that they will someday. So with the eternal hope of a four-year-old at Christmas waiting for Santa, and with heartfelt apologies to David ‘The Man’ Letterman, here are the ten things that I would like to see come true, at least for today.

10. I dream of term limits on all political offices, especially The United States’ Senate and House of Representatives. Well, and their counterparts at the State level too. How some of these clowns keep getting elected for forty years is beyond me. Know what I mean Teddy? In any other sectors of business what these scallywags pull would get them canned, or jailed, faster than they could say, “…electronic voting machines are a threat to our democracy." Right Cynthia?

Yes, and while we are at it, no more lifetime appointments either, bye, bye Supreme Court Justice. Really now, a man or woman is appointed when they are in their forties or fifties and thirty years later they think Roe vs. Wade is an option on how to cross a river, but nobody has the guts to tell them differently.

9. I wish Cindy Sheehan, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, Spike Lee; all those out-spoken Hollywood guys and gals, the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson, the ACLU and anyone else who fits this mode to just go away. Their rhetoric was old and tired in the ‘60’s and I’m too old and tired to listen to it now. If America is so wrong, so bad then just go away, leave us. I hear that Haiti is nice this time of year, the hurricane season has yet to begin and they are currently between revolts.

8. I dream that the media will someday just tell the truth, good or bad, but the truth. No more staged or altered photographs; no more innuendoes lying like a snake, hidden in their words, and no more biased stories from their point of view. No more editorializing on the front page, just the facts ma’am. If we want their opinion we will go to the Editorial Page or read their Blog. No more panels of talking heads on CNN blathering on and on about what might have happened, what may happen next or what if, period. If they don’t know what happened that’s okay too, but don’t speculate today and then recant tomorrow. No more National Security secrets spread out across their front pages for all to see and to help our enemies kill our young people. But most of all I want them all to read the definition of “news” in the dictionary. For what we don’t know on Monday will still be news to us on Friday, and if they will only wait before shouting, “Look what I know and you don’t!” then maybe somebody will not get hurt.

7. I wish we could implement Lewis Black’s Presidential election process.

Mr. Black, a comedian, has a simple and cost effective plan. Although he explained his election plan on HBO and was thus able to use a few more colorful adjectives than I can here, I will still try. First we get a monkey. Then we teach the monkey how to parachute. When the time comes for the next Presidential election we take the monkey up in an airplane, and somewhere over America, throw the monkey out the door of the airplane. After the monkey safely parachutes to earth, the monkey walks around among people, and the first person that monkey touches is our next President. As Mr. Black explains, after looking at whom we voters have elected into office the past few decades, how much worse could this be?

I like his plan. Just think about future Presidential elections with no campaigns. Of course that would mean, no more false election promises, no more boring, redundant speeches and debates, no more political TV ads per ad nauseam, no more wasted campaign contributions or taxpayers dollars, and best of all no more two party system where we are left with just two smiling, well groomed ad-men faces being shoved down the public’s throats when nobody really wants to vote for either one of them. Plus the new President would not have to answer to the big corporations or fat cat moneymen who financed his election. In fact the new President would not owe anyone for getting him the Presidency, well except the monkey. The Para-Monkey Presidential election process would solve all of this.

But I do see three big problems.

For one, PETA will never allow us to kick a poor little monkey out of an airplane door. No matter how well that little monkey can skydive.

The second is with the way things are today, we would have to take the chance that our next President very well may not be a legal citizen and in fact may be a Pakistani cab driver or more than likely speak only Spanish.

Finally, of course Congress would have to look at the plan, revise it, re-write it, vote on it and then pass it into law. I am sure that by the time Congress finished monkeying around I will have been long gone from this earth and that they would have it in such disarray that the monkey would be our next President.

6. I hope that sometime very soon our government will get smart enough to start profiling, especially in our airports. When Islamic males ages 20 and up stop blowing us up, we can apologize to anyone who may have damaged feelings, maybe even buy them a cup of hot tea, Muslims love hot tea. A beneficial side effect of airport profiling would be the much-needed crack it would create in the foundation of our asinine American institution of Political Correctness. PC being the only reason we are not profiling in the first place. But on a more personal level, I want airport profiling so that the next time somebody escorts their eighty-six year-old mother through the El Paso Airport she does not have to stand up out of her wheel chair and lift up her blouse in front of everyone around to prove that she is not strapped with high explosives but had instead just forgotten to tell security about her pacemaker. Eighty-six year old Great-Grandmothers do have a tendency to forget things; they do not have a tendency to carry bombs. In this same airport, which has a heavy stream of our Nation’s military personnel flying in and out, a young female United States Army Captain was told to take off her boots, even as she repeatedly told the security guards that, “…I have my traveling orders, would you like to see them?” To which they just kept telling her to take off her boots. So while Great-Grandma was justifiably embarrassed and the Army Officer was, in my opinion, justifiably angry, the American PC policy of not profiling was dutifully and strictly adhered to. But then hey, we mustn’t make any Muslim males feel uncomfortable or angry, because after all, isn’t that what America should be worried about? 

5. I dream, and pray, for the day when good old Common Sense rises from its grave and is once again revered throughout our land. Remember back before CS passed away? Younger people in our country won’t believe it when you tell them of this long ago time, but I’m here to tell you that it was true. That there once was a time when if a man shoved a hair dryer up his butt he couldn’t sue the manufacturer of that hair dryer because it had caused a considerable amount of bodily damage when he hit the ‘Hot Air’ switch and the ‘stupid’ manufacturer had failed to put a warning label on the hair dryer that read, “WARNING: Do not shove hair dryer up your butt and hit the ‘Hot Air’ switch.” Today warning labels have to cover just about any possibility that some idiot can come up with on how not to use a product or the dummy wins millions in our courts. Oh yes, and the warning labels now have to be printed in two different languages.

4. I wish people would start thinking again. One of the many culprits to ‘step up’ after Common Sense passed away was the Zero Tolerance Rule. Wow! That does sound intimidating. I believe that the Z. T. Rule was implemented to insure the continued demise of, and to prevent now and forever the resurrection of Common Sense. But in order to take the place of CS the Z. T. Rule needed a big helpful dose of pure laziness and arrogant indifference. Do any of you remember the old TV tag line for the show, ‘Naked City’? The tag line said, "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Well now there are twenty million stories in that naked city but under the Z. T. Rule, the stories are all the same.

The advantage of the Zero Tolerance Rule, if you can imagine one, is that it takes just that many brain cells to implement it, zero. I also suppose that I am just a little upset that if this rule was going to be ‘The Rule’ someday anyway, why did it have to take so long? Here is why I am upset. Take the Z. T. Rule as it is applied to drugs in our schools as an example. The Z. T. Rule states that a student will take no drugs unless dispersed by the school nurse. Young Kristy, a sweet high school junior and a very good student, wakes up feeling ill but still wants to go to school that day. So she takes a couple of aspirin along with her and about noon she pops them in her mouth during class to relieve her headache. Her teacher sees this and soon, the never before been in any kind of trouble Kristy finds herself in the Principal’s office getting a ten-day suspension for taking drugs in school. By the way, Kristy was working real hard towards a scholastic scholarship but once she is suspended for drug use, well. So you see, the simple application of the zero tolerance rule results in zero brain cells being used. There should be a whole lot of unused brain cells floating around out there by now. Now flash back forty years or so ago and there stand myself and my two brothers in class with no Z.T. Rule to help us get out of going to school. If we had the Z.T. Rule in those good old days I could well imagine the three of us standing in the principal’s office about every two weeks or so yelling, “Hey Princie, watch this!” as we popped a couple of aspirin. But no, we had to be more imaginative to get suspended, which means we usually ended up getting into a fight to get our vacations. Of course fighting causes pain and so after getting bopped in the jaw a couple of times and then suspended, we would go home and take a couple of aspirin. Kids have it so easy today.

3. I dream, hope and wish for the day when John Kerry and his cohorts are exposed for the black-hearted liars that they are. Not just for the honor of my fellow Vietnam Vets, but for the honor of those who also serve today. Kerry and his co-conspirators’ false accusations about the conduct of our military in Vietnam have cast an unearned ignominy upon our military that continues to the present. What they said about us years ago was treason, that they now continue to dishonor our sons and our daughters is a shame upon our entire Nation. Someday, someday, it will be righted.

2. Somewhere on this list should be a hope, dream or wish for world peace. When I was younger such a dream probably would have been included. But I am not that naive anymore. My abandonment of such utopian fantasies was not due to the mere fact that at times, somewhere on our Earth, some one was fighting some one else. The loss of this youthful dream came when I realized that all of the time, in many places scattered about our small planet, a whole lot of some ones were always fighting a whole lot of other some ones. There is just no end to war. So with this space I will just say that I hope, and pray, for our troops to soon come safely home, victorious.

1. My last dream is that someday I will be looking up at a beautiful, clear, pale blue Arizona sky when I will see a small white cloud drifting slowly towards me. I watch mesmerized as it draws ever closer until I see that there is something attached to this cloud. As the sunlight’s glare temporarily blinds me I glance away to look down and rub my eyes just as the cloud lands softly next to me. And a monkey touches my hand. Just kidding, if I ever see that flying monkey, I’ll run like hell.

SF,

Mike

"Copyright 2006.  Michael E. Tank   All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, faxed, electronically transmitted, or in any other manner duplicated without express written permission of the author."