Scary Shari, the Uncaring Harridan

AT MY LOCAL SMALL TOWN senior center, in which belief in Darwinian evolution and climate change are accepted heresy, and the human intellect is deemed suitable exclusively for the appreciation of gospel played on a fiddle, there abides Shary harridan the Acidic. osteoporosis and a cholostomy bag conspire to twist her mind, one might speculate, into a configuration of evil worthy of the devilish old testament deity they all worship, the one who slaughtered fifty thousand innocent souls as punishment for someone taking a peek into a forbidden box full of law. I tried to talk to her several times, why not befriend the wicked, foolishly hoping to be spared her biblical wrath. One time I offered: "I recently found out, by listening to a tape, that when we were in high school, President Nixon considered dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. thank the dear lord Henry Kissinger talked him out of it. Its on audio tape." Dismissively the harridan replied: "it wouldn't have bothered me a bit." The harridan, unsurprisingly, is an extreme right winger and an extreme Christian - the two seem to often go hand in hand - who seems to respond to her lack of formal education by disliking anyone who has one, and selecting her friends carefully to avoid befriending anyone as intelligent as she, an imposing task. The ceaselessly negative and abrasive person must truly be miserable. My shock and outrage were ill considered. I said nothing. What are five million dead babies to an untamed shrew? Now, I pray that the infirm be healed.. People are beautiful, and I love them, preferably from a distance, Goethe said: "noble be man, compassionate, and good." And he was right. But hatred is not an inherent side effect of personal health related misfortune. To be of cancerous personality is a choice, and a poor one. May the harridan heal her soul, if not her intellect.