Tell Me When It's Over!

Here is a TDB that I wrote right after the 2013 presidential inauguration.

Good afternoon. This is The Daily Bone, and I’m your host Chester L. W. Spaniel, chairman of the Squeaky Party. Our slogan is squeaky toys for everyone!

I have decided to not pay so much attention to politics now, but I can’t help but notice the talk on TV about the debt ceiling. OK, first there was a fiscal cliff. Then there was the slippery slope about guns and crazy people. And now the ceiling keeps going up. Why am I starting to feel like that coyote guy in a Looney Tunes cartoon?

Let’s think about this in terms of squeaky toys. If I have ten wonderful, beautiful, delightful squeaky toys that I earned by working hard all year, it is a great thing. But the government wants to take three of them to help pay for things like protecting us from enemies, building roads, and for scientific research. OK, that’s fair enough. That’s what government is for. Then they said they want me to give them another one to help pay for everyone who doesn’t have a squeaky toy. Still, I’m OK with that. Everybody should have at least one squeaky toy. But now, in spite of all my help, they still don’t have enough squeaky toys. In fact, they owe sixteen trillion squeaky toys to someone else. I can barely wrap my doggie brain around that number. Nevertheless, I said I would be willing to be a good citizen this one time, and give them yet another couple of my precious squeaky toys to help fix this debt. (So why is this hole not filled up yet?) On top of all that, they want to say it’s OK to owe even more squeaky toys by raising the debt ceiling. What kind of idiot idea is that? Grrrrrr! So, getting back to my squeaky toys, now there are only four left, and I’m starting to get sad. Then I have to give two more to pay for my health care, and everybody else’s too. Hey, where did that come from? Now I’m down to two! I don’t think I can make it through the year with only two squeaky toys! But they’re not done yet. There is going to be a tax on the air I exhale. There goes one more squeaky toy. Somebody, please, drop an anvil on me now!

Well, after all that is said and done, everybody will have one squeaky toy, including me. There was a big parade and party in Washington a couple days ago, (how many squeaky toys were sacrificed for this gala?) and everyone was cheering about it. They say now everything will be fair and we’ll all be equal. I think I’m going to have to take back my idea about everybody having at least one squeaky toy. Only one squeaky toy a year is very depressing indeed, especially when I worked very hard to earn ten of them. What, then, is my motivation to keep working if I have to give it all away? And there is still a big giant hole, with no top and no bottom, that’s going to get bigger and bigger, and no one will be left who can fill it with squeaky toys because we will all have only one squeaky toy each. What will happen when I have no squeaky toys left to give? I think I’m going to hide now. Tell me when it’s all over!