Solid black with white letters scrawled in a jagged font. Bold and big are the words, Kill Em All.” Below, in a smaller juxtaposition, Let Allah Sort Em Out.”Heres how you solve this,” my father said over Christmas dinner, not five minutes after watching a report on The Underwear Bomber.” Keep all the sand-niggers off the planes. Dont let them fly, and they cant kill Americans.”He was black, Dad,” I added, masking contempt with a tilted glass of wine.Bet a thousand dollars he had a sand-niggerish name, right?”You mean like Muhammed Ali?”Fuck you.”And a holly jolly Christmas to you.”All of them should die,” he ranted. Terrorists are just the start. Ive always said: murderers, rapists, and child molesters. None of those people deserve to live. And dont house them either. Dont feed them. Ten cents on a bullet and the problem is solved.”Top half in red with white text that reads, Hey mental midget!” The economically-sound bottom half reads in blue font to white background, Iraq is your Waterloo.”I choked down the rest of my cheap wine and inhaled. Blanket an entire race with unwarranted discrimination and youll bring the fight to your soil, to your backyard, not some lightning rod of a hellhole you cant even find on a map. The peaceful people will rise up and kill those that treat them as less than human. Theyll come at you with pitchforks if they have to, and I will show them where you sleep.Rapists, murderers, child molesters. You can slap a couple words on a bumper sticker and magically the problem is solved, right? They need to make a bumper sticker that says, If you can fit your entire religious or political debate in this space, youve raped the first amendment.”I took that too far. My father is really a good man. Neither of us were fair.I was just so sick of talking points. Exhausted with right and left. Sound bytes, puns, selective perception and fear-inspiring propaganda. Blind hatred. Boiling every issue down to a snappy snippet of rhetoric. Id realized that we lived in a country of simple solutions to complex problems, quick fixes, and only caring about something for as long as it was being reported. Everything had become black and white, even myself and my own father.

Saddam Hussein allegedly killed 148 Shiites in reaction to a failed assassination attempt. He was hated for decades. Hes been connected to mass killings of several thousand victims. During the early morning of one late December day, he wore a rope around his neck and readied himself to die. America made sure to hang him in order to depict his death as a parallel to his life choices. Some would argue against this being effective. He couldve been put to sleep like a puppy with an I.V. of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride.He couldve been shot, swiftly and brutally, with a piece of metal removing the barrier between our world and his mind with the movement of one finger just half of one inch. But he was hung, like a criminal before the rise of the guillotine, and the process was carried out slowly at the hands of two men in brown leather jackets and the strobe of lightning.
Neck snapped to the right, gazing absently like a curious marionette, his corpse reminds the living that all will be equal someday, and someday, all will be nothing.