Isn’t it time that White, Anglo-Saxon, Heterosexual, Christian, Overbearing Males had an organization all their own? WASHCOM. Not bad. Don’t they need to band together and speak out when somebody says something insensitive or prejudicial about them? Women have NOW and the Lifetime Channel. Blacks have the NAACP. The LULAC signs up Latinos. Asian Americans unite under the UAAO. Gays and Lesbians march under the NGLTF. CAIR fights for the rights of Muslims. The AAI speaks for Arab Americans. Jews use the ADA to attack anti-Semitic bias. Special interest organizations number in the thousands for every conceivable nationality and cause. Most of them are fighting for “rights” and against discrimination. If that’s true, you have to guess they must think of themselves as minorities who are being denied their rights by somebody. Who persecutes these people, pray tell? Let’s see, if you exclude Women, Children, African Americans, Arabs, Jews, Gays and Lesbians, Atheists, Latin Americans, Asian Americans and a myriad other ___ (fill in the blank) Americans, who’s left? Evidently, all of these people are at war with WASHCOMs. G.W., Cheney, Gingrich and Limbaugh could be WASHCOM poster boys. Well, they should be ashamed, shouldn’t they? Truth be known, they and their ilk probably have many deep-seated prejudices, so typical of your average WASHCOM. In honor of our Founding Father WASHCOMs, Congress should amend the Constitution to outlaw prejudice. It should establish a new Federal agency — the Commission to Regulate All Prejudice (CRAP). Having the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of property worked pretty well to build the greatest nation on earth, but these rights are too ambiguous and no longer protect the feelings and welfare of millions who have special needs and interests. The ERA and EEOC are not strong enough. We need CRAP. It should blanket the land and pass into every home, school, church and business. By making prejudice a felony, CRAP would punish all bigots, especially those who carelessly vilify minority groups. Some idiot radicals might argue that WASHCOMs have the right to be prejudiced in a free society. Shouldn’t they have the right to be a Group? Perhaps, but they better put a lid on their opinions. Or they will have to deal with — you guessed it — CRAP.

Especially if you have bad habits. Like smoking. Or visiting doctors. Or ingesting smack, drinking booze, driving cars, eating fat, flying in airplanes, having sex in the workplace, committing homicide or defending your own life. But you needn’t be concerned with living a full life. You see, we long ago crossed the ultimate threshold into the Litigation Age. History will show that toward the end of the Second Millennium and into the Third, Americans exhibited a complete loss of anxiety, a state of near euphoria brought about by their total freedom to choose any behavior under the sun with no personal sense of responsibility whatsoever. In fact, it will be recorded that those who exhibited the least control over their lives stood the chance of profiting the most through ingeniously conceived lawsuits. Some moralists out there may lament this sorry state of affairs but they would be smart to get off the straight and narrow and pray for their own calamity. With any luck at all, they’ll show up in court and wind up in Aruba.

Suddenly, life has become much easier. Various governmental bodies are taking action to prevent ordinary people from hurting themselves, or from doing bad things. The Federal Government has torpedoed tobacco companies, and a bunch of attorneys, former smokers and state governments are getting rich from litigation. Thank goodness people are forced to wear seat belts because, left alone, they would fail to do so. That shouldn’t be allowed. Cameras at intersections are nailing people who run red lights, protecting law-abiding drivers and once again saving us from ourselves. The food industry is next on the hit list for manufacturing fat-rich products, and rightly so. Alcoholic beverages are still off limits since politicians can’t be denied their medicinal sustenance. All in all, Government at all levels is intervening where God has failed. God has always had a reputation for giving people good advice, but allowing them free will, to succeed or fail, to suffer great fortune or extreme ruin. But God mistakenly has created all men unequally. He* literally stands aside and lets people make bad decisions and expects them to take responsibility for their actions. Thank goodness Government has stepped in to set things straight, to watch over us and even-out the playing field. God is okay as a figurehead, but He obviously hasn’t had a new idea in a long time. Let’s face it—in His day, He never heard of second-hand smoke.

* In the interest of journalistic simplicity, the author has chosen the masculine pronoun for God. In no way does this decision discount other views of God’s gender or lack of it altogether.