Words for My Enjoyment

How Line Drawing In Cars Can Save The World

March 25th, 2006

We’ve all been there.

Sitting in the backseat of a car with a cousin or a sibling or a really annoying friend who has decided, for some reason or another, to draw the fictitious imaginary line of which we are not to pass. Like a real world border, crossing such a line will wreak havoc on our personage — from pinches, hurtling fists and a variety of other childish retribution.

But such an act could very well save the world as we know it.

If you really sit down (no standing) and think about just what it was that kept you from crossing that line and moving in on your back-seat partner’s land, it was that they were always there ready to give you a flick or a tap if you even just inched over the line. Combined with the fact that they’d often whine something like “Mooooooom!” and you pretty much decided that looking out the window and not crossing the line was the best choice for you at any given time.

So let’s talk about real countries and real borders, now.

If I ran a country and I wanted to cross another country’s border but every time I inched close to that border the group of soldiers or citizens who lived in that country got their parents involved — what do you think I would do? Being met with thousands of mothers, wielding rolling pins, hair in curlers, possibly wearing bathrobes and giving me and my entire force that “motherly evil-eye” I would definitely back away and concentrate on enjoying the land I always had.

Don’t get me wrong — I would keep trying. But if you know mothers and you know how they respond to that shrieking sound coming from their children whose space is about to be encroached on — well, you know that the motherly-attack is more feared than any other attack on the face of the earth.

I say get these old bags involved in the Peace process and this world will be a better place.

When I was a kid sharing the backseat with my sister, the imaginary line didn’t often accomplish the goal we’d expected it to. As it was imaginary, and often ran inbetween seat belts and old wrappers and dolls and errant toy pieces — you could never get a real good solid line of demarcation working for you. So one year, in the hot summer, we took a nice thick black marker and we actually drew the official line in the center of the backseat area.

Whether or not we lined up all our crap along the line to try and upset the other party — the official, dark line helped keep the confusion down and the theater of battle to a minimum.

Enter the big black marker for the World.

Borders in the world are invisible. Sure, there are fences and check points and what not in a variety of places, but most of all you can’t fault armies for accidentally crossing borders they can’t see. I mean, c’mon here.

So I propose, in addition to having all the soldiers’ mothers available as a deterrent, we also actually color in the black line of no return along the borders of this world. So now, much like those views of countries from the sky, in which we superimpose borders just so we can get an idea of where one country starts and another one ends — we won’t have to do that anymore. There will be real, official, black lines denoting a border.

Also, my mother used to threaten “no TV” if we crossed the line and bothered our sibling…and I think that if we went ahead and denied countries involved in such border-crossing chaos the ability to watch television (and potentially no sugar cereal and video games) that they’d probably stop all this violence once and for all.

So, in summary:

• Get your mother to help.
• No TV.
• No sugar cereal or video games.
• Draw a real dark border line with an industrial sized marker — this is a contract we can give to Haliburton or some other American-based company that’s good with ink.

Somebody call The White House.

Posted under Cars, Childhood OCD's, Not-So-Politics. |