Okay, the hangover’s worn off and I’m ready to get back to presenting my opinions like a cranky caged ape flinging poop at a gaggle of rubberneckers.
I have no idea exactly how it happened, but here’s how it went:
I got into it with one of those playdoh-skulled peaceniks on Friday night. You know the type; the ones that never met anything military that wouldn’t make ’em open a fudge factory in their Stanfields. This particular twerp was going on and on about how we shouldn’t be Fighting Dubya’s War For Oil© and oppressing the nice terrorists in Afghanistan and all the other usual bullshit. He was also űberpissed about how we were making our soldiers go and fight a war they wanted no part in.
That’s where my bullshitometer redlined. I pulled the emergency brake on his little chatter choochoo and gave him the bad news that service in Afghanistan is purely voluntary for CAF personnel. In other words, if you don’t ask, you don’t go. Of course, he tried to argue that with me (a doomed effort if ever there was one) but when that failed, he fell back on wondering “what kind of person volunteers for something like that.”
And that’s when it happened.
I had a profundity; right there in the middle of the pub. I imagine they’ve probably cleaned it up by now (it was one of those kinds of places) but it still happened, nonetheless…
“What kind of person does that?” I asked, still shaking off the incredulity. “Lemme ask ya something, bozo: do you own a dog?”
“Um, yeah,” he answered, wondering where the hell I was going with that.
“Has your dog ever gotten sick?”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” This bonehead clearly had no idea what was coming.
“Just answer the damn question: has your dog ever gotten sick?”
“Well, yeah; once or twice.”
“Did you hake him to the vet?”
“Of course.”
“So you took your sick dog to the vet?”
“Yes, I took my sick f#%!ing dog to the f#%!ing vet, what the hell’s your point?” He was probably wondering if we were having the same conversation by now.
“So you treat your dog better than the Taliban treated women?”
“WHAT?!?!?” Where’s a camera when you need one? 🙄
“If your dog gets sick, you take it to the vet. Under the Taliban, if a woman gets sick, she can’t be examined by a male doctor, only by a woman doctor. But ther aren’t any women doctors, are there? Because women aren’t allowed to have jobs. And even if they could get jobs, they aren’t allowed to go to school. So that woman sits in the house — because she isn’t allowed to leave or she risks getting the shit beat out of her in the streets by the local “guardians of virtue” — with the disease or whatever it is working its way through her, and she either lives or she dies. Period. That’s it. And you can’t get your pissant little brain around the idea that some people might volunteer to do their part to put an end to something like that??”
After that, he quickly retreated back to burbling about colonialism, oil and Dubya until I popped him in the smeller and he went away. Not my proudest moment, perhaps, but one that I won’t be ashamed to share with my son one day when he’s older. (And before some knob out there starts accusing me of “advocating violence” or some other such bullshit, remember that I put a cute little kitten graphic to the right, so that makes it all okay 
)
Because I know, in my bones, something that waffling little snot will spend the rest of his life trying to avoid knowing: Without men like me, men like him are an evolutionary dead end.
The short answer is that I’m not going to be getting rid of the filter any time in the foreseeable future. Each and every day, I get about 600-800 entries in the comments that all promise me that I’ll be razor thin, with washboard abs, a $12 million Nigerian bank account, the world’s biggest trouser trout, and enough viagra to make sure everybody knows about it.
