Much has been said and done about the pesky Brown Tree Snake in recent years; an alien predator that has rid our island of most of its birds and has been associated with unexplained power blackouts. It has also been known to make its way into homes and wrap itself around babies and young children.
A few years ago my wife came face to face with this sneaky serpent as she put on her makeup while looking into the bathroom mirror. It had made its way up through the drain pipes and out the overflow hole in the bathroom sink...all the way up on the second floor. The scream was heard halfway down the block! We have also found snakes in dresser drawers and in our bird cage with two big lumps in its middle.
But the harm done our island by this slithering reptile is nothing compared to the damage done by what I call the Black Wall Snake. You can see this snake everywhere. It slithers along miles of power poles, across wires to homes, down walls, through small holes specifically drilled in walls to let it in, and into your homes.
Contrary to the relatively non-poisonous brown snake, this black snake is extremely venomous and has been known to cause its victims to enter into a semi-coma within minutes of its strike. It eventually causes brain death if a victim is exposed to its venom for a prolonged period. Small children are extremely vulnerable, but older children and adults are also very susceptible, especially late at night when the snake’s bite and venom is particularly nasty.
In addition to the comatose state that its bite quickly induces and the eventual brain death that follows, it also has a way of deadening the soul. The almost undetectable venom works its way through the eye and ear, into the brain, and slowly down into the soul causing a slow and painless but deadly, moral paralysis. This snake is extremely successful and its strike almost always goes undetected because it hypnotizes its victims before it bites.
Its favorite victims are usually seated on a couch or easy chair and exhibit a nervous twitching of the thumb.
Though the bite goes undetected, symptoms soon appear and are often the cause of a different sort of pain. Men begin to lose their hearing, become listless and forgetful. Women become anxious and neglectful of their children. Communication between spouses begins to dry up and both often add pounds. Children’s cries, pleas, and incessant questions become peripheral noise (a problem usually solved by getting the children a Black Wall Snake for their own room).
In addition to the lack of attention from their parents that children begin to suffer, their own attention spans become progressively shorter and they begin to have trouble reading and focusing on tasks. Their vocabulary increases however as they often learn words that their parents only learned later in life. And they usually develop an advanced knowledge of “the vultures and the killer hornets”. (We used to call it “the birds and the bees”.)
By now you must have guessed that I am talking about your cable. I realize that I’m sounding reactionary and radical here, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why parents will invest thousands of dollars in their children’s education, even a Catholic education, and then pay another 30 plus dollars a month to sabotage and poison their investment. You might as well save yourself some money by pulling the cable out of the wall and strangling the kids yourself.
For the sake of brevity I will acknowledge that there are many good shows that come to us via the box with the blue glow. I have, in the past, personally enjoyed EWTN, ESPN, the Discovery and History Channels, etc. The majority of programming on cable is generally okay and its content is usually harmless, but it only took one snake and one suggestion in the entire, limitless, wonderful Garden of Eden to precipitate bringing down the eternal wrath of Heaven on the whole of human history.
We did have cable for a few years and it was generally tuned into Barney and Telly-Tubbies. We never subscribed to the “pay channels” as I wanted to protect my kids from the ultra sex and violence of those channels. But, the regular channels had enough garbage on them to cause considerable concern.
While flipping through the channels one night I came across a show on channel 30 called “Undressed”. It’s a sleazy, cheap show to begin with, but this particular episode showed two young “men” in bed together, kissing. I could overlook occasional risqué suggestion of heterosexual sex on the screen, but this stuff truly angered me and made me fear for the minds and souls of my children. I canceled my cable the next day and told them why.
The Black Snake now lays dead within my wall, it’s copper-tongued head hanging from its hole in a final death-gasp. My children are safe, at least for now. I know that I can’t protect them from all the refuse and sick minds of the world forever. But I don’t have to poison them myself either.
February 27, 2000