This morning, one of my interview topics with affiliates is evil clowns. That’s something none of my professors at Ball State told me I’d have to cover. Evil clowns.
Evil clowns, you see, have been popping up in different parts of Texas. Around Austin, three schools have received clown threats. Nearby, a high school had to send a letter home about evil clowns.
NPR has developed a compendium of evil clown sightings. Left out, though, are the evil clowns near my hometown.
I awoke to start jabbering with stations and spotted this post on facebook. Apparently, this is where we are as a society. We’ve got nothing else to worry about, so let’s be evil clowns.
On the phone, I would mention that we seem to have come a long way from the Greatest Generation.
Every year, a bunch of World World War II veterans are flown from DFW to Washington DC to see the memorial. A couple years ago, the group was having breakfast at Love Field before leaving. I stopped by and started chatting with veterans. Most of them had never met, but they had all fought in World War II, so they started joking around like they had all been buddies for years.
I remember two guys who had never seen each other before shake hands and asked each other their units. They started laughing when they realized they had both been in the same part of Europe at the same time.
“Oh, we got them from the south. You got them from the north,” one of them started laughing as he patted the other guy on the back.
I also covered a story a couple years ago about a class of people learning to become stenographers. The school had brought in World War II veterans, and the students were stenographing the vets’ life stories.
I sidled up to a white-haired fellow who had just finished. I asked him for a quick recap. He said he “didn’t do anything special” and then, I swear, and then talked about how he was on a plane that flew through a mushroom cloud to take measurements.
He then explained that he got upset when he landed because everyone on the plane was given a film to keep on their uniform that measured how much radiation they received. He said the flight doctor saw that his film had turned black and said, “You’ve had all the radiation you can handle.” The guy said he was upset that he was grounded as a result.
He flew through a mushroom cloud and was angry that he couldn’t do more. That’s the Greatest Generation.
Mine shall be known as the Evil Clown Generation [or, possibly, the Repossessed Getaway Car Generation]. The Greatest Generation liberated Europe from one of the most evil men in history. We’re liberating the United States from its dignity.
