Scared to Death
M Alan Roberts

It's Halloween time, Grub Streeters, and I want to scare you. I mean I really want you to be shaken into some serious fear at the conclusion of this article. For that reason, I am going to tell you about the most vile entity ever known. It drips with evil. It is murderous and cares for nothing. It is self-serving and is the singular cause for millions and millions of lives ending every year. It is a liar of the most devious sort - and it is killing you even as you read this.

Death comes in many styles. It isn't always so blissfully simplistic as the termination of a life force. Sometimes, death is slow and deliberate. Sometimes death is put upon us over time - making us suffer for years. Sometimes evil hides discretely in the guise of good. Pain, like death, comes in many forms. There is the pain of fire burning your flesh - and there is the pain of disease striking you from within. And this poisonous entity that I am speaking of combines all forms of both death and pain, and then it puts them on all people everywhere, relentlessly, mercilessly. It is the purveyor of pestilence and the foreman of famine.

The atrocities of war - the killing of innocents and innocence alike - is only one small torture method of this death machine. More devastating still is the constant introduction of psychological terror upon the masses. Without ceasing, this destroyer attacks all who dare to stand against it. It crushes them quickly if they make themselves known - and it murders them slowly if they are weak and subservient. It scans international societies for any sign of disobedience. It uses people against people to do its malevolent bidding for it. It forces us into slavery and will never willingly allow us to experience individual liberation.

When people band together to live as they would choose, this monster of filth and lies sends in its minions to vanquish them. Devices and weapons are unleashed to incinerate their bodies - even the bodies of infants. Indeed, infanticide is but one of the uncountable acts of horror that the demon commits. On the more subtle side, this criminal wages never-ending warfare on those who profess to support it and love it. It causes them to become criminals themselves in order to be granted its false approval.

It adds chemicals to their food sources and rots them from the inside out. It induces cancers upon them so that it will not have to support them past the age when they can't serve it with agility any longer. It takes their earnings from them to the point that they are left no choices save to continue to struggle constantly, unable to rise to any level of joy or elation. It takes from them more than they are able to create. It rapes them of their very vitality one crawling, painful day at a time.

It destroys the natural splendor of the planet by producing pollutants for the air breathed, the water drank and the land lived upon. It offers only three choices for all: death, unquestioning servitude or incarceration. People are driven to madness as this doer of iniquity plows through their lives and distorts their souls. It cares not if they do themselves in - just another method of its goal of extermination. It lodges itself - like a side thorn - into them and festers there. It infects them with disease and causes them to fail. Left broken, they see the end of their lives wishing they had never been born at all.

The devil is real. It is upon you always - stripping you bare from the very core of your existence. It waits for you to die. It longs for your replacement by a more able servant. Evil is with you this Halloween, Grubstreeters - and its name is the US government.

BOO!