I’ve always had trouble making decisions. Oh, not the little ones, not the “Decaf or Regular?”,“Shall I Supersize That For You?” Vanilla or Chocolate kind of decisions….those I’ve got down cold. I can handle those in a heartbeat.

No, the decisions that I have trouble with are some of the bigger ones…some that aren’t even mine to make. Like the death penalty, for instance. Nobody likes the idea of a bunch of bad guys hanging out on our tax dollar for years waiting for their final punishment for whatever heinous act they’ve been convicted of.  Seems like it should be easy to know how I feel about that…who could possibly like those guys in that situation? 

Well, it’s not so simple. First of all, why does it cost so much to keep some bad guy in jail in the first place? It’s supposed to be punishment right? But if you have the time and inclination to find out what the per diem cost of keeping a convict in jail is, you’ll find that it’s more than you spent per day on your last vacation to Club Med. You remember, the one where you had one too many “Crazy Parrots” and tried to convince Kim the Aerobic Instructor that you were pretty much ALL muscle…  Oh, that wasn’t you? Excuse me, but you get my drift. 

It would be cheaper to keep all these guys in a Ritz-Carlton with room service than it is to keep them in jail. In fact, why don’t we do that?  Then I wouldn’t have trouble making the decision about them. OK, I know, you are probably thinking that’s ridiculous! We can’t put criminals in the Ritz-Carlton!” All right then, consider really bad rooms with mold problems in Super 8 motels and only two McDonald Value Meals per day. No Supersizing. How about that? Then we wouldn’t have to kill them all, and that’s good because that’s the part that I really have trouble with. Killing them, I mean. The majority of them may well deserve it, but I couldn’t personally be the one to push the button, or syringe or whatever and if I can’t do it then how do I feel OK with asking someone else to do it? Isn’t it pretty much the same thing? Besides, God wouldn’t like it. He said so in his book.

So I just can’t decide what I think about the Death Penalty, but I’ve learned to live with that.  Right now, however, there is a much bigger and more immediate item on the agenda that I can’t decide about, and that’s what’s got me worried. 

It seems that our “President” has decided that everything bad in our country right now is because of people who have come here illegally. Even though it is increasingly difficult to come here legally, because there just isn’t enough money in our budget to have places for people to apply for entry and, the ones who manage to apply legally may have incredibly long waiting times to be “processed”. It also seems that the darker your skin is, the longer it takes for the authorities to handle your case. 

But, the people manage to get here and, because many of them are willing to work for less money than a Citizen will work for, most of them find work. Incredibly the same Government that can’t process their case in a timely fashion, seems to be able to issue a Social Security number and accept tax dollars from these Illegal dangerous criminals who are ruining our country while they simultaneously build our homes, tend to our landscaping ,pick our crops and  care for our children. Multi tasking at it’s best!

As the years drag by and these dangerous folks continue to work they, being human, fall in love, have sex and produce children. Their children may or may not be birthright citizens depending on the day of the week, how Donald Trump is feeling on that day and, of course, the hue of their skin. 

Also dependent on those same variables, Trump’s complaints about these people may vary. The Hispanic ones have a tendency to “take our jobs” and “smuggle drugs”  while those from “Shithole Countries”, mostly dark skinned folks may be guilty of “Eating the Cats, eating the Dogs and eating the Pets” of their neighbors. Once they’ve had their fill of domesticated family, furry friends, they move on to committing outlandish acts of fraud…bilking our Government of BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars. It’s amazing how these clearly inferior people are able to dupe the Federal Government, controlled mostly by really smart White people, into giving them money for these bogus operations. That shows you just how evil they really are. The “Shithole Country” people, that is, not the honest upstanding white Government folks. 

Anyway, in all his wisdom, our Esteemed Orange Leader was able to find the time, as busy as he is obfuscating the investigation into his proclivities for pedophelia, to take ACTION! He created an elite force of miscreants, I mean Dedicated Patriots, to seek out all the bad, evil, black and brown people and lock ‘em up. They’re put the in Concentration Camps, oops, I mean “Detention Facilities” and after no further planning throw them on planes and ship them off to whatever country was the lowest bidder and willing to take them. Trump didn’t worry about “Shithole Country” people going back to where they came from nor the Latinos going to their country of origin. It hardly mattered after all! As long as it made the Evening News on the Propoganda Channel and kept people from asking any questions about the Mar-a-Lago Kiddie Orgies.

Unfortunately, even highly trained and rigidly disciplined teams of Enforcement Officials make mistakes. Teams of violent poorly trained overpaid reptilian moronic Patriots make even more mistakes. So it came to pass, that these masked and badgeless Enforcement Agents were committing random acts of violence against innocent civilians, regardless of their legal status. From beatings and chemical spraying to murder, they managed to violate the rights of nearly everyone they encountered. And It has finally come to the attention of almost everyone in the United States. 

Our “President” says that they’re Insurrectionists, Radical Leftists, and Domestic Tertorists. I guess that he should know since it’s his job and that’s what we elected him for….well we didn’t actually elect him, a guy named Elon Musk, who is very good at manipulating stuff made sure that, no matter how people really voted, the Official Results would convince the Electoral College that Donald Trump should be the President.They must know what they are doing, I mean it’s a College, right? They should know. 

Anyway, given that what the President and his Minions, I mean Cabinet Officials say, Americans have a decision to make. Do we blindly believe what we’re told by a guy who thinks that “Covfefe” is a word or do we believe what we see with our own eyes? Donald Trump says that anyone who says anything different than HIS version of things is Fake News or a Hoax. I mean, we have to remember that Donald Trump is our President and he knows who’s been bad and who’s been good. Sort of like Santa Claus, but not quite as benevolent. One of the things that Donald Trump knows is that pretty much any small boat between South America and North America is loaded with drugs destined to be forced down our throats. The only way to protect us from horrible deaths is to make sure everyone on those boats die a horrible death first. It doesn’t matter that there’s no proof…They ( meaning anyone who isn’t white ) are out to get us and we have to get rid of them all. 

The Fox News Guy says so and so does the Puppy Killer lady and so does JD Vance, the couch fucker himself. The question for All Americans to make is who are you going to believe? And what are you going to do about it? That’s the decision that we all have to make. 

With such firm and strong opinions from some of our country’s greatest leaders, you’d think I could make my decision in a second. I mean after all, I’m White and I’m American, don’t I have to believe  that we’re right? I mean, we’re Americans

so we’re always right, aren’t we? 

Maybe, that’s why I can’t make a decision. Maybe America isn’t always automatically right. I really believe we try to be, but sometimes we do tend to get a little bit nasty. Particularly when things don’t go our way, or our economy isn’t doing so well. Nothing like rounding up few hundred people that don’t look like us and sending them to prison in a country that they’ve never been to or to utilize multi-million dollar Cruise Tomahawk Space Invader Viper rockets to kidnap the leader of a foreign country or steal their ships to prove how good we are.

But then there’s God. I must have missed the asterisk after the “Thou shalt not kill” part of his book. Surely it’s OK sometimes…we’re America, right? After all they did start it didn’t they?  There aren’t any kids being hurt anyway, at least not the kind that we care about. They dress funny , they talk funny and Trump has a Peace Prize to steal, I mean, win. But what about our  kids? What are they going to think about their parents who let this shit happen? We need to decide about our own morality and the morality of our leaders. Not an easy decision to make when your neighbor may disagree and have more guns than you. WHO IS TELLING THE TRUTH? We have to decide.

I’m not the only guy who has trouble making decisions. Most of us probably have some doubts about lots of things, but it’s too hard to know what to think. There’s so much information out there and we only have so much time and capacity to process it all. It’s not like you can ask Alexa or Siri for the answer and expect anything like Human Intelligence, no matter how “smart “our phones are.

It doesn’t work that way, we’re humans with only a little bit of capacity to think, remember and choose. That’s why so many of us tend to agree with the last thing we heard….and we tend to listen to the same people all the time because that’s the guy our friends listen to, or because we like the way they talk or because we agreed with them in the past or maybe just because we like the way they look!  We might agree with somebody just because they are a Democrat or they are a Republican. This is a very, very, bad idea. 

I’m proud to be an American, most of us are pretty good, well-meaning folks. I’m also proud to be an Independent. I’ve got a voter’s card that says I am. (Independent, that is….I added the “proud” part) Maybe not being able to make a decision isn’t such a bad thing, maybe it means I’m listening. Maybe it means that committing ourselves to a killing people is something that needs a LOT of thought and soul-searching. Is there no other way to handle monsters than to become one? Aren’t we smarter than that?

I don’t know, as I said in the beginning, I’ve always had trouble making decisions. 

Paul M. Hellings

1/29/2026