Bottom Line

Maybe I was twenty-five or so, discouraged, unemployment checks nearly run out. Job hunting all morning, getting nowhere but tired. Disappearing sounded good. It was a narrow, dark tavern on 7th Street, downtown. Two o'clock in the afternoon, working on my second boilermaker, so the rest of the day was certainly blown. 

Sitting next to some guy named George, and he was laying it all out for me. The kind of deep and dopey drivel that comes with an alcohol haze. "You see, you got your humans. And, you got your hoomans. Humans are the savers, the hoomans are the destroyers. Now, humans and hoomans, they're not the same, you know, not at all. 

Hoomans, they eat their own. They trust no one, not even each other. They hate the good things, and they'll kill anything for any reason or no reason. They'll take everything you have, that's the hoomans. So us humans have to get rid of every single hooman on God's good earth. Or, we don't have a prayer of a chance, right? Anyone can see that." 

George finally stopped his yapping, only to take a long draw from a mug, nearly halfway thru his pitcher of the horrible house draft. But, he soon went right back to his crazy rant, and I was plenty sick of him by then. A lot of fat, rich politicians have gotten elected spouting worse, all that Us or Them stuff. It can work as a perverse strategy, George could easily embrace that dark logic.

On the fringes, there are always the most extreme notions, wrong theories born from fear, fraud, or foolishness. World doomed from the start, or destiny coming as a blind and massive meteor. Or, global wars will bring all to dust and smoke. Bottom line, so many feel just as George feels, hellish monsters of the very near future already imagined, and at large.