Commentary
By Richard E. Noble
When you get into your 60s, as I have recently, it suddenly appears that there is an assassin in the sky who has for some reason picked you and your family and friends as targets. He is not hiding in a swamp in Vietnam, a bell tower in Texas, or in a book depository window. He isn't peeping out of a hole drilled in the trunk of a car but he is taking potshots. He is up there somewhere in the sky and he is methodically liquidating everyone you have ever cared about or loved.
Often his first targets are your mom and dad, and next he picks off an uncle, cousin or even a brother. There is no modus operandi. He seems to be selecting your friends and relatives randomly and using any and every type and kind of exterminating agent.
Every so often you get a call. He just hit Leo and he wounded Billy and Jake. They are both in the hospital and they may not make it. But why those guys? What did they do?
This assassin has no mercy. Sometimes it is a car crash, or a mine explosion. He uses any kind of weapon. He spreads bacteria and infects one of your old chums with a horrible disease. He manufactures cancer causing agents in a secret laboratory and emaciates your aunt. He gets into canneries and processing plants and contaminates the food supply.
Your old high school girl friend dies of some type infection you never heard of before.
He zaps one of your own children with a crippling, bone deteriorating disease that even the specialists never heard of.
He puts bugs in drinking water and worms grow in people's eyeballs or he poisons human blood. People die left and right. A college buddy of yours who joined the Peace Corps dies from polluted water born bug infestation.
He has figured out ways to manipulate the human genetic code. He can turn your potential healthy child into a cripple or an idiot with one little twist here or there.
This guy in the sky is totally unscrupulous. He has no moral character. He kills women and children. He tortures babies to death before they even get the opportunity to enjoy life. He somehow has figured out how to manipulate the earth's inner core. He causes volcanoes to explode and drowns unsuspecting, primitive people and sophisticated populations alike in a bath of scolding lava.
He can produce tremors in the earth and cause roads and overpasses to break apart and whole cities to collapse. Your daughter gets killed in Mexico City by one of these catastrophes. You can't understand it. Why you? What has this assassin got against you?
There is no end to this guy either. As fast as the scientific detectives find cures and antidotes for his biological warfare and highly infectious diseases - he invents a new one. Every day there is a new one. And every day brings news of a friend who has this new and horrible thing - and he dies. And you and your buddies all say; How the heck did Joe get that crap. It must have got into him when he was in Korea or Nam.
Year after year and day after day the number of your friends and relatives gets fewer and fewer. Pretty soon you are surrounded by a world of strangers. None of these strangers know your old buddies and old friends. What is worse none of them are interested in what happened to any of them.
They aren't interested in you either. The other day the assassin in the sky shot a round and hit you in the eye. Suddenly the world looks like a Picasso painting. You get out of your car and a leg freezes up and you fall to the ground. What is this assassin in the sky pulling now? You try to tell folks what is happening to you but they don't want to see your scar. They laugh. It is like they think that you are supposed to die.
You’re walking home with a bag of groceries one afternoon and you realize you don't remember where you live. How can that be? The assassin in the sky must have put something in your drinking water; he must have infected your salami sandwich; he's put bacteria in your bicarbonate of soda.
This son of a gun, this terrorist in the sky will do anything to get you and yours. He has no mercy; he has no conscience. The man is a serial killer and he will eventually kill everybody. He is a terrorist that can't be stopped. He is the war nobody can win. He is the biggest. He is the badest! He always wins. And you and yours always lose. If you don't lose today, you will lose tomorrow. And if you are the last one in your crowd to get hit, there will be no one there to hold your hand or to be sorry. The strangers don't know you. What do you expect?
