By Tim Pouncey
It's autumn and soon another year will lay crumpled in the great wastebasket of life.Autumn is traditionally a time when plants become dormant, animals hibernate and we all pause to consider an essential truth: We're all gonna die. Not "one of these days" or in some distant and detached future. These days death is closer than that coaster your spouse keeps shoving under your cup so you won't leave rings on the coffee table (when will you learn?).And it's not a good death either. It's not like in the movie Sunset Boulevard where you get to hang around and narrate stuff that happens after they find your corpse floating face down in the swimming pool. It's not a CSI: Miami death where you look fabulous and get to snort coke and have sex in flashbacks for a solid hour after your autopsy. We're talking about a hideous, bloated, eyeball-melting, flesh-peeling, stench-emitting death.
The kind of death that can only be provided by your government.
Take Hurricane Katrina for example. On the morning of Sept 10, Reuters news service reported more than 700 deaths have been confirmed in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. This body count seemed to have profoundly disappointed Col. Terry Ebbert, Director of Homeland Security for New Orleans. "The numbers (of dead) so far are relatively minor compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," Ebbert said. Col. Ebbert's comments echo an increasing concern I've been hearing from many people this week. How did Hurricane Katrina --- a storm clearly named for a Russian Spy --- only manage to wipe out a few hundred people? Come on. That's only a crumby a triple-digit body count. Heck, I can get a better death-toll than that playing Halo II and I'm not even good at it. People have been criticizing local, state and federal government relief efforts as being too slow. Now we know why --- If only a couple hundred people were sent to knock on heaven's door, what's the big deal? People have been jumping ugly with the government for dragging their collective feet in evacuating New Orleans but now we see their game plan: They were just waiting for a better casualty rate so relief efforts would actually be worthwhile.We're getting a much better return death-wise on our continuing adventures in Iraq. On Sept. 10 CNN.com estimated there have been 1,893 American deaths in Iraq, not to mention an estimated 10,000 civilian deaths.Now that's more like it. Those are kinds of numbers we can all relate to, unless, of course, we can't. Those numbers don't seem nearly high enough for the pro-war demonstrators that protested Cindy Sheehan when she had the audacity to try and talk with the president a few weeks ago during his most recent vacation. Now the president is going to have to take another vacation to put this whole war-protest/ New Orleans catastrophe behind him. I mean, with people dying at this rate and the damn liberal media reporting it, the man is just not getting any quality recreation time.And if the President Of The United States can't even take a few months off to clear some scrub-brush on his sprawling Green Acres dirt ranch, then what chance does any of us have for happiness?
And without happiness, we're better off dead.
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