Poosey Digest: All off a gentle head slap

Greetings from Poosey.

Every time our Ladies Auxiliary Guild convenes for our January meeting, the role call is answered in response to the same question: “What can we do to bring about world peace?” It’s a noble enough query, although I doubt that the world has changed much over the years because of the wishes of a group of slightly decaying ladies of Poosey.

I’d grown tired of the usual answers so when it came my turn, I made a few heads turn by saying, “I think I’d go home and gently slap Herb up the back of his head.” Sometimes I do and say things just to make life more interesting. When my fellow guild members asked me for an explanation I told them it was simple…

If I conked Herbie a good one, he’d no doubt get irritated, jump in his truck and tear off down the street to let off steam. With Herb’s sense of direction, he’d be lost within a mile or so causing a statewide search for a crazy old man. The holidays being slow days for news, the report of a lunatic senior citizen running wild across the Midwest would likely grab national attention. President Trump would hear of this and become jealous of someone stealing the headlines from his tweets and would order the National Guard to descend on Illinois and Missouri to find Herb and thus allow Donald’s twittering to once again grab the leading story in the nightly news.

China would misinterpret this move by Trump as a compassionate gesture and assume that the U.S. President was becoming a bit more human. In response, China would offer to act as a go-between peacemaker bringing both North Korea and the U.S. to the negotiations table. After convincing Kim Jong-un that a few billion dollars would be a tidy sum to trade in exchange for his nuclear missiles, the Korean conflict will end, leaving China as the smiling peacemaker and allowing the residents of the West Coast of the U.S. to sleep more peacefully at night.

When Russia sees China and the U.S. cozying up to each other, Vladimir Putin will sense that he’s being left out of the influence game and will come clean on his country’s involvement in the U.S. elections. The Russian president will at long last reveal that he is a nephew of socialist Bernie Sanders and the digital campaign to bury Hillary was simply an attempt to put his uncle into the White House. The special prosecutor will find that the series of meetings and emails between Team Trump and the Russians were a plot to obtain high quality vodka for the bars in Trump’s 11 hotels and 17 golf clubs.

Israel and Palestine will notice that these alliances are being made on the opposite side of the world and will decide to lay aside their differences in a sort of international “Me Too” movement. They’ll take a cue from the parking laws instituted in some crowded areas of Chicago with Israel taking control on the disputed territories on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, leaving the Palestinians to run things on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sundays they’d simply chill at Starbucks and try to get along, and after a month or so of Sundays both factions would learn that they really could live in peace. Meanwhile, the excessive new amounts of steam released into the air by the Starbucks espresso machines would speed up global warming enough to convince the naysayers that science is real, there is no Easter Bunny and that the Earth is not flat.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the round Earth, the U.S. Congress will be shamed into talking to each after the Israelis and Palestinians come to an agreement. Democrats will forgo their antagonistic ways, the Republicans will realize the minority party represents millions of voters, and the two groups will begin to chat across the aisle. Somewhere in the middle of this love fest, the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Rogers will return and convince the legislators that their job is to do what’s best for the country rather than ensuring their next election.

The American people, having seen their president act sanely and the Congress get a clue about what it means to govern, will begin to treat each other with the respect we once knew. Politics will no longer be discussed at Thanksgiving dinners and children will once again be allowed to watch the evening news.

I closed our guild meeting by advising all the ladies present to go home and give their husbands a gentle whack behind the head in the name of world peace. The motion failed due to lack of a second.

You ever ’round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.