OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
With all the zombie cannibals on the loose these days in this scorching heat, choking wildfires and violent winds, we are living in some terrifying times.
At a time when all the news is pretty frightening, the most horrific news came last week with the autopsy revealing that the Miami Beach cannibal was not, in fact, high on bath salts when he ate off the face of a homeless man in the hot sun.
Bath salts was such a convenient answer. All we have to do is refrain from smoking fever-inducing synthetic bath chemicals and we won’t find ourselves in the shimmering heat devouring a homeless dude. Or our neighbor. Or our children.
Turns out only a touch of marijuana showed up in the guy’s toxicology report. That, the experts tell us, was unlikely to have caused the man to snap into cannibalism.
The “bath salts” explanation so dehumanized the man that we didn’t even have the usual uncomfortably introspective national conversation about what we have become. President Obama did not form a task force to get to the bottom of it.
Most amazing of all, Al Sharpton did not accuse the cop who shot the cannibal of being racist. Nor did he launch a big noisy protest, complete with merchandizing and T-shirts and copyrighting the zombie’s name.
I mean, the guy had a girlfriend and she seems supernice and she said he was great with her kids. He was real religious and he was sweet to his mother. He faithfully went everywhere with his Bible in hand. And, oddly, his Koran too. Both books were with him on that fateful day when it all went horribly wrong.
Now that we know it wasn’t bath salts, what was it? Had he just hit the end of the line, generally where the rest of us feel we are most of the time nowadays?
Was he just tired of high gas prices and trying to find work? Did he just get to the end of his rope when his purple car wouldn’t start? And then it got towed because he was parked in the same place too long? Which was because he couldn’t get it started? Then he had to walk in the heat across a three-mile causeway? Did it just make him snap?
Or did Satan just get into him and possess him and force him to perform evil so unthinkable that we just felt relieved he got shot? Then looked away.
Despite all the insistence by politicians that they can fix all our problems, they only seem to make them worse. They keep spending our money, sinking us further into debt. Now they are talking about printing more money, giving it away again to banks in order to — oh, who are we kidding? Everything is just so broken. The banks will just continue to reap massive profits while we suffer deeper and deeper into debt.
Then there is Obamacare, which is the craziest zombie there is, devouring us all bite by bite. Uncontrollable. Unstoppable.
We turn to the “conservative” Supreme Court to stop that zombie in its tracks. But, instead the court simply approved its rapacious appetite for our hard-earned money so long as they called it a tax and not regulation of commerce.
It’s enough to make a man do something crazy.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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