~by Colleen O’Brien
Turning off one more tirade from a hopeful presidential candidate, I fantasize a bleak future.
America needs to get rid of immigrants and put them and other bad types into sanitariums to remove their influence from good white Christian mates. I’m not an immigrant; my nearest connection to one would be my paternal great-grandparents, who immigrated here from Ireland a century and a half ago. I do have immigrant friends, however, and we did have an immigrant First Lady (Slovenian-born) in the recent past, not to forget her immediate predecessor, as wife of a fellow who seems to have an aversity to immigrants except in his own backyard and as long as they’re pretty and female and foreigners.
The only immigrant to marry and ascend to such high position before Melania was British-born Louise Adams, First Lady to President John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829.
But I can see myself, a woman of a certain age, remanded to a home that would keep me from polluting the citizenry because of my age and my political choices. I am on the older side of life, I am a longtime self-avowed yellow-dog Democrat, which to the rabid Right means I’m diseased, and I write political pro and con columns regarding what both sides are doing. My political and personal profile is on the wrong side of the rightwing ledger, even though their boss is old, like me, and his wife is an immigrant. He’s not a yellow dog, of course; he does write a lot, however, on X, which used to be Twitter, mostly about how he loathes those who are not him.
What I fantasize when things go bump in the night is the Mean Boys coming to get me to hide me away, die me away, in a concentration of old people who lean Left. I know in my heart the home won’t come with a recreation room sporting a printing press.
My fantasy blooms into fear of where I will hide when they come banging on my door. I live in a pretty cute doublewide trailer with no place to hide – no basement, no attic, no backdoor. I would have to prepare ahead of time, pulling up floorboards and camouflaging the area, then hiding under the house – an 18-inch crawl space secured on the perimeter by cement blocks and heavy wire, a deterrent to squirrels.
I will leave a note on the kitchen counter at all times to put people off: ‘Walking to store this am. Check around noon; if I’m not home, call the EMTs to look for me along Burnt Store Rd.’ This would be for any friend or enemy who might stop in and find me missing. [I’m told that the phrase “Find me missing’ is an illogicality similar to ‘turned up missing,’ ]
After that I don’t know what I’ll do. They’ll impound my car, so I’ll be on foot or at the mercy of friends . . . who might want nothing to do with me. Since there is no public transportation in this part of Old-People-Land, I will have to hitchhike. If I can make it over to the gas station, I could hornswoggle a ride there with someone – iffy situation, however, chances of winding up riding with a Nazi truck driver being 50/50.
With luck, I soon would be a roaming homeless member of the declining group not yet rounded up. Note to myself: figure out camouflage. MAGA hat from Goodwill, maybe?
I might need a better plan. I’ll be working on it, a good reason to get me away from my book-reading to do something more titillating. I could make a novel out of it. My husband always told me I could write a book any day because I had such fanciful ideas and lived in a novel in my head anyway. Finally, the Great American Novel from the mind and hands of Procrastinator par Excellence Colleen O’Brien. I’ll be like Helen Hooven Santmyer, author of “. . . And Ladies of the Club.” At the age of 88, she became a bestseller.
Well, on to my future; I’ve left myself stuck under the house like the vermin I’ve been dubbed. And I have to get into my house to get out of the house. Hmm…. I’ll need a helper, a co-conspirator.
Or a better plan.
