Suffer the little children

Many years ago, I fell in love with and married a Salvadoran refugee. We went through the cruel immigration dance, got her a green card, waded through miles of red tape, and brought her children legally to the United States. They were 3, 5 and 7. The girl was the little one. Let’s call her Lucy.

My wife grew up in a slum of San Salvador. Her father was a farmer, and still had a tiny plot of land in the countryside, where he grew avocados. My wife grew up in that tradition.

With a family to support, I quit my job as a paralegal working in U.S. immigration prisons for a dollar an hour, if that, and took a job with The Brownsville Herald for $6 an hour — enough, back then, to buy a nice house in Brownsville, Texas, for $55,000. We put our kids into school.

No problem with language barriers, because most everyone in Brownsville is bilingual. (A wealthy banker told me, “I’d be an idiot if I were not.”)

My wife wanted to plant fruit trees and raise animals. So we planted bananas and kumquats in the back yard and bought some ducklings, and a little kiddie pool for them to swim in. As they grew up, the lady ducks made nests under the banana trees and commenced to lay eggs. That’s what lady ducks do.

Once that production line booted up, my wife would steal out a couple mornings a week and swipe an egg or three from the nests, to cook breakfast for her family of five.

I like duck eggs. They have a stronger taste than chicken eggs, but eggs are eggs. Turkey eggs taste even stronger, which I also like. Plus, fewer eggs per omelet.

My wife never took all the duck eggs; she always left eggs for the mama ducks to sit on.

Then one day — I forget if it was a special occasion or what — she decided to roast a duck for dinner. While the kids were in school, she chose a duck — the laziest layer, I presume — wrung its neck and plucked it, cleaned and stuffed it and cooked it up.

When the kids came home from school, that duck was already in the oven, not cooking yet, but out of sight of the kids. Out of sight of Lucy.

When my wife placed the roast duck on the table, Lucy — all of 6 years old — opened her eyes wider and taller than her head, and ran out to the back yard to count her ducks. And found one missing.

She ran back to the dinner table and screamed at her Mom: “You killed my duckie!”

“No, no, Lucy,” her Mom said, “this is a chicken.”

Well, a roast duck don’t look nothing like a chicken. It’s longer, and bigger, and — well, it don’t look like a chicken, even to a 6-year-old girl.

Lucy ran to the kitchen sink and hauled out the little trash can under it, burrowed in and came up with handfuls of feathers and bones — and the head of a duck.

“You liar!” she screamed at her Mom.

Caught, red-handed.

Mom told Lucy to sit down and eat her dinner, and Lucy did, but she wouldn’t take a bite of that “chicken,” wouldn’t even let her Mom put a dab of it on her plate.

This brings us to today’s lesson.

If a 6-year-old girl can spot the lies her Supreme Authority Figure is trying to feed her, and refuse to accept it — even though she’s hungry, and the food is tasty — why do 70 million Republicans continue to snarf down the bullshit their fat daddy shoves down their throat every day?

Don’t they have any more sense than a 6-year-old girl?

(“Suffer the little children to come unto me" (Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16) from the King James Version of the Bible.)