Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

It was mother's day. I missed my dad's birthday, new years, christmas, thanksgiving, and even Halloween. But of all days I saw him on Mother's day. It was really hard for me to see him as always. When my mom woke him up, there was a look of shock as he saw both of us, his head turning left to right as if the entire thing was some kind of dream. Then he started crying again. I tried to communicate with him but I found it hard. Not just that he can't talk or even nod his head anymore. But just coming up with something that wouldn't evoke that sense of depression instilled in him every time I have to see him. Not my depression but his. There seems to be a slow recognition, a very slow sense of response but it exist at the smallest level possible. He spent most of the time looking at me and was trying to utter something but only a hollow sound issued from him since half his face is paralyzed. I felt so awful watching him struggle to one side of the bed, his hands shaking with fragility. Then watching him trying to move his now useless right arm. Simultaneously, I felt bitter, sad, angry, helpless, and sullen. If I were god, half the world wouldn't be able to stand at this point because I'd hurl lightning bolts at everything and waste most of the world just as it wasted my father. I wanted politicians and countries to crumble, doctors to melt, and capitalism to eat itself from existence. To find out that a person who'd worked as an honest person for most of his life to be reduced by this uncaring, unsympathetic, animalistic society brings all the clarity of what the world represents to me at once. I'm going to utter a curse in that I curse George W Bush and Dick Cheney to exchange places with my father. I want them to suffer what my dad feels everyday. I want them to lie in a bed with a diaper, mouth dribbling from words that cannot be spoken, tears for yearning just to escape while they remain in the shells of their decaying bodies, the world a witness to what happens to those who truly deserve such a fate. Yes, I believe there are those that deserve such things, but it's not my father. He was an innocent man that was duped by this society into thinking that a certain mode of living was correct. Instead, he wasted his existence struggling only to provide a fraction of a percentage point to the machines of destruction. The illusions of graduer he was briefly granted from time-to-time turned on him. The food, the drugs, the alcohol, the late night meals, the smoking, the TV, all things that represent hedonism of unnecessity are what literally took his life and turned it into a grovelling snail, permanently couped up with a tube sticking from his chest. Then as I look at the medicaid spending going to the military, the handshaking going on ranches between oil friends, the trees and environment being slashed up by greedy corporations, the wasted lives of brainwashed youth being sent daily in troves to Iraq, the spewing rhetoric of lies being exchanged by old, useless, powermongers, I think that I'd want to strike nearly everyone down with a billion volt lightning bolt, except that it wouldn't be in instant, but a prolonged, agonizing stab where the human race would see for once what it is in front of themselves, what this whole useless meat existence represents and the guilt of the foundation of wasteful, meaningless hedonism it built. That's this planet's fate I decree.