Taxpayer! There's a Fly in my Soup!

Mack Hall

I was raised on a farm, a real farm, not a weekend play-farm, and fresh food around the seasons was always a part of my childhood. I didn’t appreciate it. Once upon a time I rejected something that was placed before me at the kitchen table: blackeyed peas, perhaps, or collard greens.

“Each your supper,” my father said, “there are children starving in China who would love to have those peas.”

I replied in the insolence of youth with “Well, they can have mine.”

I still feel the pain. There are just some things you don’t say about food to folks raised in the Depression.

Terry Nichols, one of Timothy McVeigh’s conspirators in the murder of 168 people, including children, is suing you and me because he doesn’t like the food placed before him in prison.

And since Mr. Nichols is a federal prisoner (folks still tend to disapprove of murder), the working American must pay for the lawyers Mr. Nichols will use to sue the working American.

Mr. Nichols, who suffers a delicate digestive system and an acute sensitivity in regard to theological issues, maintains that the lack of whole grains and fresh food is causing him to sin against God.

Maybe Mr. Nichols finds sin in food grown with ammonium nitrate and delivered to the prison in a rented truck.

Perhaps the prison television has been showing the Food Network. God know what might happen if they start broadcasting Bridezillas.

If Mr. Nichols wants to be treated as if he were in daycare, he shouldn’t have blown up a daycare. After all, only licensed physicians are permitted to kill children, at some $10,000 a head.

Perhaps the lawsuit will be adjudicated at the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City.

There is no way of knowing how many American children starved to death in the Great Depression. Such really happened, and the survivors are reluctant to talk about it. Any American child in those terrible years would have been very happy to have Terry Nichols’ supper then; children in the Sudan would be very happy to have it today.

Because of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, some thirty or forty children in Oklahoma City did not live to make whiny faces at the supper table at the risk of a good spanking.

If this matter comes to adjudication, the thoughtful, reflective, working American must hope that the thoughtful, reflective, working judge will listen carefully to sensitive Mr. Nichols’ petition, consider it carefully, look at Mr. Nichols, and say “No. Next case.”