Tyrant

Today I realized that the only way to avoid life’s daily annoyances is to live in a totalitarian dictatorship dedicated to the eradication of your pet peeves.

I was standing in line at a check-out, and had to change lanes because the person in front of me decided to fill out a credit card application with reward points for what was soon to be a defunct department store. At the next checkout, I had to wait because the person in front of us was having a price check on an item that couldn’t have been more than ten dollars to begin with. As a general rule of thumb, if a deal on an item seems too good to be true and it’s on the wrong shelf by itself with no price tag, you should price check it before getting to the cash register. That’s why most stores have barcode scanners everywhere. The first checkout I’d been in was nearly clear by the time I went through the second one. On the way out of the store, the door alarm beeped, meaning I was expected to wait for someone to check my receipt because the cashier couldn’t be bothered to deactivate the tag. There was no one around and I decided to leave anyway. I could have avoided the checkout entirely and just walked out without paying, and the results would have been the same.

Throughout it all, I thought about how great it would be if soldiers just dragged everyone off the second they began to irritate me. I’m not necessarily saying they should be taken to concentration camps. The beauty of my idea is that the actual fate of these people is never disclosed. They’re just, “taken.” They could be going to, “Re-education centres,” or to, “Candy Mountain.” In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

I wonder if people living in Germany, or Russia, or any other of the hundreds of countries who’ve had their own concentration camps actually cared about what happens to the people who’re taken away. The Germans obviously knew something was up, but they all claimed ignorance after the war. They saluted and shrugged it off. Think of our own society and how many people are in prison right now. Sure, there’s murderers and rapists in prison, but they’re there with the drug addicts and people who’re caught shoplifting candy bars.