Ohhhhhh kayyyyy. I had to skip lunch today, so for dinner I moseyed over to my default restaurant, which is Ethiopian. I’ve gone there about once a week for 12 years or so, except during a year it was being remodeled and the first year of the pandemic. I’m friends with the family that owns it, and the father loves to come out of the kitchen and sit with me, especially when his home province, Tigray, is winning the civil war, as it is right now.
So tonight there’s an older white couple in there, maybe 60, visiting from Florida, talking about some cute toddler they know and how he hates the stroller. My friend sits down with me and joyfully tells me about how his countrymen captured XXX soldiers from the national army and all this equipment. The woman calls out that “We’re winning,” and my friend says “Oh yeah, she is part Tigrinya.” I glance at her and say “…Oh?” because she sure doesn’t look Ethiopian to me. “Yeah!” she declares, “I don’t know how much, but it’s a lot!” I nod, and the woman spills into a halfbaked lecture to her husband on how the Ethiopian Church is older than the Catholic Church and have the Ark of the Covenant.
I turn back to my friend, and he tells me some of the funny excuses the Ethiopian government is making for their losses — one of their officers was supposedly smoking hashish and that’s the only reason Y and Z happened. I laugh and compare that to Russia’s excuses for their Black Sea flagship sinking, and Trump’s excuses for this and that.
The lady’s voice rings out across the room. “Trump isn’t what you think he is!” We turn our heads. "I"m not a Trump supporter BUT – " And I couldn’t hope to reproduce what comes next as she said it.
Trump and Biden and everyone else “are just two buttcheeks right next to each other,” and THE SAME PEOPLE are behind all of them. You know who it is? It’s KLAUS SCHWAB and the FREEMASONS, the Jewish and Catholic Freemasons, and she was telling her daughter, showing her a building with NO WINDOWS right down on MASON Street [I think she meant Masonic Avenue], and asking her "Why would you build a building with no windows? WHY??? WHY??? Because you DON’T WANT ANYONE TO KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING IN THERE! And what you’re doing is making people turn against each other, making them fight! It’s KLAUS SCHWAB at the center of it all! It’s one person CONTROLLING US ALL!
She goes on and on, and my friend and I stop paying attention. He starts telling me how tribes in Libya started fighting each other when the strongman left, which is the opposite of the lady’s claim about how the strongman makes us fight each other, and I quietly observe that tribalism is the natural state of humanity. “WHAT is?” the lady demands from across the room. “Tribalism.” I motion for my check.
Well that’s exactly what I’m telling you, it’s KLAUS SCHWAB, and that’s why Jesus is the only answer, the only one who can unite us! I’m now handing over my credit card. So, although she’s crazy, I essay, “But then Christianity becomes a tribe, and they only want to punish the other tribes.” And she says “CHRISTIANITY IS SHIT!” which is not quite what I expected her to say, “Like the Catholics, they twist and pervert everything Jesus said. JESUS HIMSELF IS THE ONLY WAY!”
And I’m signing in my check while she goes on, and my friend and I start talking about something else again. She realizes this and starts lamenting to her husband that people don’t want to see. And he agrees as they pack up to go.
I wonder if he just humors her or if he believes any of that himself?
