There are kids all over this country, and they go online and become “radicalized.”
They go on a white supremacy site, and they become drooling racists cleaning their guns every night and wearing Confederate flag T-shirts. They go on an ISIS site, and they grow a beard and they start cleaning their guns every night and wearing T-shirts with Quranic verses on the front.
And it ends in murder.
Meanwhile, what’s your oldest doing? You know, your son, Shawn, the one who hasn’t had a job since Blockbuster Video went out of business?
He’s online, all right. He’s playing “World of Magic,” an online game in which his character is a female elf named Shymala. He’s online, all right. He’s online looking at Southeast Asian transvestite porn. He’s online chatting with his anorexic little nasty of a girlfriend, is where the little putz is.
And Shawn doesn’t own any guns to clean. He has a collection of “action figures” which, face it, are dolls.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think dopey little Shawn should join any kind of group which will eventually lead him to kill black people or white people or soldiers or just regular folks who happen to be sitting in the wrong White Castle.
We’re not going to have that kind of trouble with Shawn. Not our boy. The kid’s a jellyfish, and not the kind of jellyfish that stings you to death, either. Shawn’s the kind of jellyfish who just floats round like, well, like a big glob of jelly.
You know why we have to keep sending the National Guard to all of our little, wrongheaded wars? It’s because Shawn did not rush down to the Marine recruiting office right after 9/11. He’s not headed down there now, either, no matter how many recruitment officers get gunned out.
Don’t you wish your kid had just a little of that ISIS/white supremacist commitment? Don’t you wish he’d at least go to junior college?
I know, I know, those Muslim extremists are all crazy, just like those shaven-headed white supremacists. They’re as crazy as my uncle Albert was when he dropped out of high school at 16 to go fight Nazis.
Yeah. You can’t shift Shawn off the couch with a crane and other guy’s kids are getting radicalized and believing in things and killing and dying for their beliefs. If everybody on the other side wasn’t crazy, you’d be embarrassed.
Don’t worry about Shawn, though. He’ll get a job at a Dollar Store and, eventually, because of his 85 percent attendance record, he’ll become the manager.
And, one day, when an armed radicalized individual bursts through the door screaming the name of Allah or some dribble-drabble about, “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right!” Shawn will be killed in the name of the Dollar Store. The next day, your suburb will break out in flags and candlelight vigils and Shawn will go home to heaven like a hero.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. Dion’s latest book, “Marc Dion: Volume I” is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle.