The Conversation

I heard the strangest conversation today. I was at the American Embassy to get some additional pages sewed into my passport. Sitting in the waiting area, I overheard a guy behind me talking to the guy next to me. They started before I got there.

The amazing part was, they were taking turns saying something but what they said seemed to have very little to do with what the other had just said. It was like:

"Sure, we bombed them but they declared war on us. The Japs bombed them too, and made them do it. But they spied on the Japs for us!"

"Now we don't know who our friends are. Our old allies. We went to war in Iraq and what, Turkey, somebody else, they tell us we can't fly through their air space."

"The Vietnamese, they're communists but now they want to be our friends."

"I was in that war there, in Vietnam, Laos, I was in this area for eight years."

"Yeah, but what people forget is that America is a capitalist democracy, not a socialist democracy. This Obama is the worst thing that every happened to America."

"Everything is crazy now. My son just got a job with the NSA, and they wanted his original birth certificate! I mean, they have his passport, so he must have had one! I had to turn the house upside down to find it."

"He wants socialism! He wants to turn America into like Europe, going down the tubes."

"The problem is, anybody can vote. I mean, democracy, some people have no education and some people are, you know, not intelligent but every vote counts as one."

I wondered if they were deaf and trying to fake it. You know, picking up a word here and there. They were a little older than me, late sixties I'd say. Both of them had Thai women in tow, fifty-ish and patient looking, taking the bitter with the sweet.

I picked the right day to go, that's for sure. The place was empty, I was the first on line everywhere I needed to go. The whole enterprise took twenty-five minutes all together! Amazing.