Try Reparation H to ease your past sufferings

Monday, November 17, 1997

Try Reparation H to ease your past sufferings

PAST WRONGS:

As long as exploits are atoned for,

I have bones to pick too

Last Friday, The Bruin’s Viewpoint section explored the issue of
reparations. They wanted to know what we should do about paying
back every people that has been ripped off, exploited,
incarcerated, massacred or otherwise treated poorly by another
people over the course of the last 200 years. At first, I thought
the issue was a bit silly. Why should I pay for something that
somebody’s great-grandpappy did to somebody else’s great-grandpappy
way before I was born? It’s not like I was there; my kin were
starving to death in Ireland around the time of the Dred Scott
decision. And so I wondered what it all had to do with me.

But I thought about it and I realized that the pro-reparations
crowd is on to something. I realized I was wrong. Reparations are
good. So good, in fact, that I decided to hop on the reparations
bandwagon myself and make my own bid to get a nice fat slice of
reparations pie. Here’s why:

My parents were wacky Christian fundamentalists when I was
growing up. They attended a church that was constantly trying to
predict the exact date and time of the coming of Armageddon. The
overseers of our cult divided 144,000 by the number of books in the
Bible, multiplied that by the number of Apostles, subtracted
principal, interest, property taxes and insurance, squared that
number by 666, then held the result up to a mirror and read the
number backwards. They would then announce to our congregation that
Armageddon would commence at exactly 4:17 p.m. July 6. Of course a
month or two later they would adjust their ETA (Estimated Time of
Armageddon) and advise us accordingly: "Oh, by the way, brothers
and sisters, we forgot to add the number of goats Noah took with
him on the ark, so we’ve rescheduled the end of the world for 3:28
p.m. Aug. 5." The congregation would let out a collective groan of
disappointment, as everyone, my parents included, had already given
notice at work, listed their homes for sale, reserved a U-Haul, and
stockpiled a year’s supply of road flares, tin foil, beef jerky and
Tylenol (for the pestilence) in a hole the back yard.

Now, I say three cheers for religious freedom. But … I went
through my entire childhood thinking I had no more than a few
months to live. It’s hard to give a damn about feeding the dog or
taking out the trash when you’re constantly waiting for a
six-headed beast to come out from behind a tree and bite your head
off. I distinctly recall being 10 years old and regretting that I
wasn’t going to live long enough to experience being a teenager.
Consequently, I went through my teenage years with a
less-than-healthy fear of death. I reasoned there was no such thing
as an untimely demise. My flight-or-fight reaction always defaulted
to fight. I started causing trouble. I wound up in jail a couple of
times. My GPA started to slide.

Of course, like the proverbial check that’s in the mail,
Armageddon never showed up. In an effort to undo the negative
effects of having been brainwashed, I tried to relive my childhood
by doing some of the fun stuff I’d missed out on, like going to
Ikea and thrashing around in that room they have that’s filled with
thousands of plastic balls. One time, firefighters had to use the
jaws of life to extricate me from a McDonald’s Playland structure
wherein I had become hopelessly lodged.

I also did several hundred hours of therapy. Therapy was good
for me and came not a minute too soon. I enjoyed some of the
exercises: using crayons to draw portraits of my family frolicking
in a lake of burning sulfur, punching couch cushions as hard as I
could, and screaming over and over, "I forgive myself," at the top
of my lungs. It was fun. But it wasn’t cheap. I figure I’ve spent
about $30,000 on therapy over the course of my adult life (100
bucks a week equals $5,200 per year, times six years equals
$20,800).

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only expense I incurred while
trying to overcome my parents’ weirdness. With all the stress and
everything, I started grinding my teeth at night. My dentist (whom
I highly recommend if you need one) says he can fix my molars for
about $3,500. Then, there have been all the attorney’s fees, bail
and fines that ill-tempered people such as myself tend to rack up
over the years. I figure that’s worth about another $45,000. Let’s
not leave out the medical expenses I incurred from various
fistfights and auto accidents. Setting the third and fourth
metacarpal of my right hand (bouncer’s head) and a couple of ribs
(police baton) wasn’t cheap.

Then there’s the issue of pain and suffering. I hurt. I
suffered. I’ll settle for 100 percent of the physical damages and
medical expenses. That brings the grand total up to, um, let’s just
round it off at a quarter of a million dollars. My dad passed away
in 1991, and his estate is closed so I can’t go there, which is
really a shame because I was the executor of his estate, and I
could have sued myself for some serious coin, but I didn’t know
anything about reparations back then. I forgive myself. Besides, my
mom is still alive.

* * *

Dear Mom:

Guess what I learned in school today.

I learned that you owe me $250,000.

Please deposit it in my BruinCard account, like, today.

Love,

Michael

P.S. Can I borrow the car tonight?

* * *

Now, it wouldn’t be fair for me to go after her and not go after
the people who put all those hopped-up crazy ideas in her head in
the first place. So, I’m going after the congregation too. While
I’m at it, I’ll go after the company that published the cult’s
reading materials. I might as well get a slice of the royalties. I
even thought about going after the folks who originally wrote all
that melodramatic stuff about Armageddon but thought the better of
it. One has to draw the line somewhere.

So now I’m a quarter of a million dollars richer because of
reparations. But I don’t feel any different. I’m still angry. I
still feel cheated and deprived of some basic human entitlement.
I’ve dug down deep inside to try and figure out what it might be
and all I can figure is that I’m really mad at England. As you
might gather by looking at my last name, I’m Irish. Check it out:
Erin go bragh.

It was that English guy, Oliver Cromwell, who dispossessed so
many of my people from their ancestral lands. Cromwell isn’t with
us anymore, which is a good thing because if he were I’d give him a
piece of my tam-o’-shanter (or shillelagh, whatever it’s called).
But I had an inkling that his spawn was around. So I looked in the
UCLA directory for a Cromwell. Any Cromwell. I didn’t find Oliver
but I did find Jerry, as in Jerry Cromwell, a second-year geography
student living in Dykstra Hall.

I called him right away and asked him if he knew if he was
related to an Oliver. He said no, he’d never heard of him. So I
said, "Oh, really? ‘Cause I found a laptop in Bunche with his name
on it," to which Jerry replied, "Oh, that Oliver, yeah, I know him.
He’s my, uh, brother," to which I replied, "You owe me $250,000."
He didn’t seem to grasp the validity of my demand, so I explained
it to him. We eventually negotiated a mutually agreeable reparation
settlement, and his check is in the mail.

So now I’m even richer. But I still can’t shake that feeling
that I’ve been robbed of something. Then it occurred to me that
maybe my problem wasn’t with England but with General Mills. I went
online and read its annual report, and as far as I can tell,
they’re loaded. And where did they get all that money? I’ll tell
you where: Lucky Charms.

General Mills has co-opted a sacred icon of Irish folklore, the
leprechaun, to sell its cruddy product. How much of that money goes
into the pockets of the good Irish people who suffer as a result of
General Mills’ cold-blooded marketing ploy? I don’t know. It didn’t
say anything about that issue in the stupid Annual Report to
Shareholders
(http://www.generalmills.com/financial/report/AnnualReport-complete.pdf).
How convenient for them.

I demand reparations! They have misappropriated my people’s elf!
Do they think we’re just going to go away? All we want is our fair
share, and they don’t even have the guts to mention us in their
annual report. So I called them. Eventually, I was connected with
their Office of Consumer Affairs (as if I would consume Lucky
Charms) and this lady answers the phone and says, "Mr. Cromwell’s
office." I just about had an aneurysm. I told her about my problem.
She put me on with Mr. Cromwell. I asked him if he was related to
Oliver Cromwell. He said, "I am Oliver Cromwell." Well, after I
glued the phone back together I called him back and told him I
wanted $250,000. He said, "No problem." The check is in the
mail.

Dear Notre Dame: You’re next.

So all in all, I think this reparations thing is a great idea. I
made about three quarters of a million dollars today by righting
the evils of the past, and we all feel a lot better now. It’s a
win-win deal. Unfortunately, I got a call from Ernie Wisbrod a few
minutes ago. He and I went to elementary school together and he
said I screwed up his life by calling him a wuss when we were both
in the fourth grade. He wants a quarter of a million dollars. I
told him no problem; the check is in the mail. And by the way: Top
o’ the mornin’ to ya.