Dear Editor,
People not wearing masks better stop talking to me on the street.
I’m trying to protect them.
The unmasked might be asymptomatic carriers.
They might infect me.
They might infect you.
That’s why I shot that nurse. My paintball could have been a bullet. Special operations credit me with 47 confirmed kills in Afghanistan. Snipers get your attention. Masks matter. Mother Nature is my commanding officer.
Grass seems greener since the stay-at-home order.
Sky bluer.
Air cleaner.
If you stand in the morning stillness you might get the idea that nature gave humanity a reprieve. Rather than a monster asteroid taking out mankind, the most destructive disease in the cosmos, she offered us an olive branch.
Perhaps we’ll plant, reap ripe fruits of nature’s magnificent labor. Rebirth is possible. On second thought, humanity has devolved. Most people simply find our mutual mission of discipline too hard to carry out. Instead, they sharpen the olive branches into spears, kill something and throw the carcasses on the grill. At the very least they’ll poke out their eyes with the charred tip andgo blind.
How soon they forget.
Climate change and bat germs are connected. Global warming and viral disease are connected. Rising seas and melting ice caps are, indeed, water under the dam after raging seas destroy our cities and drown the children in a tidal wave of surprise.
What, me worry?
Bumblebees fly faster nowadays, more energetic as they pull nectar from thriving bushes. Birds sing louder, more melodious in the absence of most people who never listened to their songs anyway. Humans tune out nature. Pampered with privilege, our species craves hot tubs and water parks, steak fillet restaurants and chicken wings and movies on demand as they yearn to cheer national sports teams and regain identity they depend on others to provide.
It’s good we’re not trying to survive a nuclear strike or two or ten. What would residents of LA and San Francisco, Phoenix, El Paso, Chicago, Miami, New York, Boston and Philadelphia do if they got hit at the same time or one after another? What would America do?
America is mad, of course, as in mutually assured destruction.
We want to party.
We want to disco.
We want our leaders to Set-US-Free.
That’s why I have a hit list. You might be on it. I’d watch my back if I were you.
See you soon.
Signed,
William the Paintball Sniper (and his bird, Dillon).
PS
The other night I saw the Blessed Mother in a local pizza parlor.