Conspiracies lead to barbeque and reconciliation

One morning you finish your Danish, consider reaching for another but instead you Google around for government conspiracies that seek to block your pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

And suddenly it dawns on you---what about Daylight Savings time? What gives the government the right to tell you when the sun comes up or down? It’s the King’s tyranny all over again.

So you join the Peoples Movement for Sunlight (PMS) – a volatile angry bunch. You go to meetings. You make banners. You begin to hang out with women who wear lots of turquoise jewelry and shapeless cotton dresses and aged men with grey hair in braided rattails and you consider learning to play the sitar. You get your fighting orders from coded weather reports aired between 7:00 and 7:09 each morning on the Billy Buck Country Legends radio show.

Before all this you were worried about your bobble-head novelty store and the declining sales of life-size bobble head figures of rock stars but that’s all gone now thanks to Obama’s handouts to big business-- your main competitor was a large corporation in Boise Idaho-- and now you’ve lost the house on Lake Norman and the chalet at Jackson Hole Wyoming.

Janet, tired of your sudden outbursts of sobbing, took the kids to Chicago and you moved into a studio apartment downtown so now you have plenty of time to write scathing letters to the editor and attend PMS rallies and go to the shooting range with your AK-47 to practice for the pending revolution.

You use to be a church going Republican, a Rotarian, a card carrying Food Lion shopper, an easy going laid back kind of guy but no more. You’ve been roused from a deep mental slumber after a lifetime of apathy which, now you know, was induced by food coloring approved by the US Dept. of Agriculture designed to make you lethargic and docile and so now you eat only organic vegetables ordered on-line from Peru. Now you are alert and aware of other social issues and you can remember birthdays and anniversaries.

Your awareness compels you to be active in other causes and you start wearing sandals. You’re now against the forty hour work week, fluoride, internet pop-ups and the Charlotte Observer.

You don’t necessarily agree with the right wing Sunlighters that believe there should be strict rules based on scripture as to when the sun comes up or with the left wingers that believe the government uses airport body scans to lower melatonin levels in your body. It doesn’t matter. These differences disappear within the united effort of battling a Washington that attempts to regulate even the sun and is indifferent to the needs of bobble-head shop owners.

Then “The View” TV talk show does a story on the PMS movement (Whoopi Goldberg endorsed it) and so does NBC news. All the Sunlighters except you are delighted. Sarah Palin jumps in and says she’s been there, done that, got the T-shirt and claims we should put the sun back into the hands of God. Chairmen of both the Republican and Democrat parties begin to meet with PMS leaders for breakfast where they order $57 muffins.

You realize the movement has now tilted and is leaning towards Politics as Usual (PU). It’s sad.

You must choose---remain on the front lines and be a pawn or take that job you were offered cooking pork barbeque down at the Proud Pig diner. Call you crazy---but you chose the Pig.

Now you chop pork, joke with the customers and Janet called during lunch---she misses you and she wants to talk.