Fighting chaos at all costs

As I put together Monday's Union-Sun & Journal, it struck me what I was doing.

If you'll take a look at page A8 of that publication, you'll notice a theme: Complete and utter chaos.

I even joked to a colleague of mine that I was putting together an "All (the man won't let me use this word) breaks loose" page.

See, we try to put like-themed stories together on a page so that once a person starts reading it, they're likely to want to read the next story and the next, etc.

In the past couple years, we've had elections pages, state budget pages, war pages, terrorism pages, you name it.

But Monday's page A8 was deeply disturbing for me.

To recap, there was a story about the syncronized bombing in Riyadh, below it was a story about the same in Morocco, and to the right was a happy little number about nuclear proliferation in North Korea.

Now keep in mind that my job is to bring you the news. Good or bad, that's what I do.

So Sunday, the purpose of my getting out of bed was to let you know about suicide bombings and an ongoing nuclear program.

Mildly depressing to say the least.

Now I could go into a diatribe here that when we had a good president you didn't read these stories because the world was a more peaceful place.

Then you'd tell me that we didn't read these stories because we were too busy hearing about Mr. Clinton's sex life and then I'd tell you that we had to talk about the president's sex life because the rest of the world was calm and rational thanks to his watchful eye.

But I won't go there.

No, today we're talking about chaos and what we can do about it.

First and foremost, stay away from places like Saudi Arabia, Morocco and North Korea.

Avoiding Israel, the entire Middle East, and the majority of Eastern Europe wouldn't hurt, either.

And apparently Florida at election time is downright pandemonium.

So from the comfort of your porch or living room, call Sally Struthers and send food to sick and needy kids. For less then a cup of Tim Hortons coffee a day, you can feed whole villages.

Ask Sally to connect you with Billie Mays when you're done talking to here. I'm sure they're friends. He'll hook you up with the power of orange so you can clean the furniture that - against all odds - you can still afford to keep after paying your federal, state and local taxes.

Then jump on a plane and take off to New York City or Los Angeles. We'll show those terrorists that we're not scared by attending Broadway plays and overpaying for stuff at Saks Fifth Avenue that celebrities like Winona Ryder get for free.

Oh, and also start boycotting all things French, Canadian, French-Canadian, and Canadian-French. Those two-bit nations didn't support our effort to free the Iraqi oil ... er, people ... and we'll never forgive them.

We'll show them by getting screwed by good American companies like Honda. No more LeCars around here.

Finally, you can help subdue chaos by buying your cigarettes from your local NOCO station instead of the reservation. Pay higher taxes like the rest of us. It's only fair.

Or, of course, you could just go back to bed until this all blows over. Save me some covers.