This morning I heard a story on NPR about a guy in the National Guard who lives in a trailer in Mississippi with his wife and their six children, and he's upset that he can't seem to get his ass deployed to Iraq. No, he isn't attempting to escape from his P.W.T. hell into death's icy embrace as you might suspect. The poor bastard just wants to double what he was making as a civilian...I believe the story cited his former job title as "handyman." I say former because he got canned when he initially received orders to ship out, in spite of the federal law that forbids employers from doing such a thing. In addition to the fat salary increase he could have received, he wanted to get full-blown Army healthcare for him and his wife and their SIX children, which you can guarantee he wasn't getting from any employer that skirts federal law. Losing his job would have been okay, except that the Army later decided that he wasn't fit to ship out after all, due to depression and motherfucking GUM DISEASE. He lives in a trailer park AND he has bad teeth, but somehow his name isn't Cletus? On top of that, oh Christ, the dude's wife quit her job at McDonald's to undergo fucking cancer treatment. Even NPR seemed to be taking subtle potshots at the guy, showing a picture on their website of him and his wife standing in front of Wal-Mart where they spent their honeymoon (no really I'm serious), and pointing out the fact that his trailer where he lives with his six, holy god, SIX kids is decorated with pictures of NASCAR drivers. This fool just can't catch a break! So in short, this gum bleeding Wal-Mart fantasizing six-kid spawning NASCAR decorating Mississippi trailer park resident has found himself in such a position that his best option is to go off to fight in a war where he could get maimed or fucking killed. He's got six kids, a wife with cancer, and no job: politics simply doesn't enter into the equation for him. And to top it all off, it's fucking me up because it's causing me to have about a hundred and seventeen different reactions, all of which conflict with each other. I hate to judge people, but I hate to sound like a liberal snob; I hate to come across like a bleeding heart, but I hate that people keep on fucking breeding when they can barely take care of themselves; I hate making asshole trailer park jokes, but then I keep reading stories about people like this who live in trailer parks! This guy may personify a lot of the things about America that make me cringe, and yeah, maybe I think he should be sterilized before Cletus # 7 appears, but damn if I don't feel just a bit sorry for him! I want to beat the crap out of this guy and give him a hug all at the same time.
Maybe I'll write a play about him. I've been looking for a topic.
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