I used to live with a Jew and a Methodist minister in a house in Central, South Carolina, where we invited a few black students for a party where the white folks would cook white shit and the black folks would cook black shit and we would all eat each other's shit because that's what America is all about.
It was all shit, of course.
We all knew that it wasn't the meal that mattered. It was whether we would agree to be who we were in a rented house even when the evil shit showed up. You know, the neighbors.
It wasn't al that bad. For the white folks. They called the cops to complain about the party, which wasn't as loud as any of the redneck barbecues in the suburb of Clemson, South Carolina, and the cops were kind of embarrassed coming to the door to tell us that they had received complaints.
I was drunk that night and probably stoned on weed, acid, and meth. My Jewish roomie, who later spent a night in jail after trying to free God from a couple of cases of Coke bottles on Mister Natural, saved me from my Christian brethren by explaining that I wasn't really related to the black people who were cooking chitlins in the kitchen and I meant no insult by referring to the uniformed officers as fat obnoxious pigs because that would be an insult to my roomie who did not eat pork, even though he was gay.
About the same time, I wrote a poem called Arabs and Jews that was published in a small magazine in Washington State whose name I can't remember, although The Anvil comes to mind, by an editor and publisher who felt compelled to tell me that he had accepted the poem despite reservations expressed by other members of the editorial team.
That poem, like many other poems and stories and articles I have written over the years, suggested that if the United States had any balls, it would give all aggrieved parties in the Middle East 24 hours to remove themselves from the so-called Holy Land before turning several hundred square miles of that unfortunate territory into a sheet of glass. End of problem.
When people talk about all options still being on the table, I trust that everyone understands that what I just wrote in the previous paragraph is, and always has been, one of those options.
Doesn't that make you feel better?
A little warm milk and a colonic before retiring, and your life is guaranteed to be blessed.