Tuesday, November 10, 2009

I'm Just so Cool

By the time most of you read this, John Allen Muhammad should be dead. If you don't recognize the name, Muhammad was the elder of the two Beltway Snipers who killed 10 people around Washington, DC, in October 2002. He is due to meet the executioner just hours after I post this.

There are a few times in my life when I say something out loud and then a while later I am shocked at my own prescience and appalled at my friends' and family's inability to hang on my every word. First (and perhaps more compelling), I declared that Barack Obama would be the first black president while he was still giving his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention for John Kerry's run for president. I actually said this out loud while sitting at the copy desk at the newspaper where I worked at the time. It may be hard to remember this now, but Obama at the time was still an Illinois state legislator and I was watching the damn speech on mute while I worked. What I did was freaking mind blowing. Unfortunately, four years later when Obama actually won, no one remembered me saying this. Stupid piss ants.

Another amazing encounter with my inner clairvoyant came during the 2002 shooting spree. This took several weeks to unfold and when news of the first deaths started rolling out, I made a joke along the lines of "It seems unfair that all of the good serial killers are white. This seems to be unfair discrimination. Why aren't there any black serial killers?"

Then a couple of weeks later it turned out that the two killers were, in fact, black and it kind of looked like I controlled the world there for a few seconds. But seriously, if I could control the world, I seriously hope it wouldn't be limited to dictating the race of serial killers. I'd like to think that I'd focus more on ending poverty and ignorance or something.

Then again, I've done very little of importance with the limited abilities I actually have, so who knows.

3 comments:

courtney said...

Well, aren't you special. I was gone from the copy desk by the time the DNC rolled around in '04 so I was not there to hear your prediction about Obama. Even if I had, I'd probably claim I didn't remember it just to mess with you. I'm nice like that.

Julie said...

So what are you going to predict next? The first black Bill Gates? Maybe the first black hockey player of the year?

A Free Man said...

I thought the same thing about Obama during the 2004 convention except I didn't think he would win because I couldn't imagine America electing someone named Barack Obama. I undermisestimated us.