Tax Day

Today is tax day, and that means it’s Sammy’s day to shine.  Years ago Sammy fought to institute a NO TAXES day at Arby’s, which meant that all food would be tax free.  At first Sammy was going to get in trouble for doing a corporate-non-approved promotion, but he convinced the regional manager that telling people they weren’t paying taxes on their roast beef was really just a matter of dropping the price that day a few cents.  Sammy figured that political weirdos would find an ally in Arby’s and more than make up for the lost revenue.  And that’s exactly what happened.  Every year the special has gotten a lot of customers coming in on April 15.

I decided to have lunch at Arby’s, and I’d never seen so many people in the restaurant.  Most of them were wearing sandwich boards that reminded me of St Rick the Baptist, but instead of warning sinners about an afterlife their signs warned voters about children getting free lupus treatment.  The entire Arby’s turned into a political rally, and as I sat in a booth by the door I saw a couple young people with goatees and hemp bracelets turn around before they even got inside. 

I don’t much care about politics unless people are getting electrocuted.  There’s an old poem about doing nothing in politics.  I’m not exactly sure how it goes, but it’s something like:

They came for the Jews,
and I didn’t say anything because I’m not particularly religious. 

They came for the obese,
But I’m naturally thin and I enjoy now having more space.

They came for Canadians,
but I wasn’t a Canadian, so it didn’t bother me. 

But then they came back and must've thought I was Canadian,
So they shot me.

I know that’s not how it goes, but this is the version that Sammy and Boyce created after trying to remember the poetic abortion they heard me recite during speech class in high school.

As more people came into the Arby’s I noticed a disturbing number of shirts and signs of bald eagles crying, much like the picture below.  It finally became too much for me so I told the least threatening person wearing the shirt that, “You know bald eagles can’t cry.”  She tried to tell me it was symbolic over what we were doing to the country, but I asked her why couldn’t she do something more biologically accurate like having
the bald eagle try to fly while dragging a hammer-and-sickle-like anchor.  She told me that was a fine idea, but she liked the bald eagle crying.  I tried to explain to her that at best I should assume that the health care bill is some kind of intestinal parasite, and the tear is actually a watery pus due to infection.  In that case, of course, the bald eagle could use that free health care.  People don’t want dialogue in politics, though, and she just kept saying it was crying.