When I was a teenager, I was fearless… more likely unaware of life’s pitfalls. I saw no evil anywhere and I fearlessly rode my bike in Paris bareheaded and wearing short pants. And like all my contemporaries, I survived unharmed.
But that was then, and this is now.
Today America feels more like a war zone than a nation at peace. Bullets are flying everywhere, and everybody will soon be wearing helmets and bulletproof vests… just in case. For fashionistas, Kevlar is going to be the garment of choice… for you never know when you are going to run into an aggrieved gun-toting advocate. And there seem to be plenty of them out there with itchy trigger fingers…
The times they are a-changing… That’s for sure, but the honey-tongued NRA is putting up a brave front on all of this. We don’t need to change anything, or very little they say… everything is fine… don’t worry, everything is under control.
This reminds me of an old popular French song that went:
Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,
Tout va très bien, tout va très bien.
Pourtant, il faut, il faut que l’on vous dise,
On déplore un tout petit rien :
Un incident, une bêtise,
La mort de votre jument grise,
Mais, à part ça, Madame la Marquise
Tout va très bien, tout va très bien.
I took the liberty to substitute one line of this song to illustrate my line of thought.
Everything is fine, Madame la Marquise,
Everything is fine, everything is fine.
However, we must, we must tell you,
We regret a very small thing:
An incident, a mistake,
The death of your gray mare,
The shooting of 19 children in Texas
But, apart from that, Madame la Marquise
Everything is fine, everything is fine.
Unfortunately, despite these reassuring words, things are not going well on our planet.
Batten down the hatches my friends, the worse is yet to come.
Alain