What’s the matter with kids today
I sit at the window with an AK-47 cradled in my arms the way I might cradle a baby.
Out there, beyond the ridge line shock troops gather – donning body armor for the intended assault.
They might have come for any of us in the past, we being on every government list from animal rights to anti-global warming.
But no one took us seriously until today.
We were always that ineffective pathetic mob the truly powerful tolerated when they could not ignore us, hapless idiots carrying signs but no weapons.
They know as we know they are better at killing than we are – better maybe than we could ever hope to be.
They constantly prepare for the moment when the poor and abused rise up in riot to get back what the rich have been stealing from us all of our lives.
They want us to riot, giving them an excuse to blow us away.
But then, by pure accident, we became dangerous.
No just one or two of us, but all seven.
As if fate lent us a weapon we might use against any government in the future.
My wife noticed first, calling me into the den where our two year old sat before the computer and had somehow broken the code into the Pentagon.
We shut down before the government traced the leak back to us.
Next door, Bob and Better caught on when their five year old came up with a formula for a device more powerful than the H-Bomb.
Steve, our anti-nuke guy, recognized enough from the gobbly-gook to check it out and burned the research when he found out what the kid had come up with.
It didn’t stop.
Other kids inside our group, and apparently outside it as well, began to do and discover things no on their age should have.
Talk got around.
Eventually, the feds picked up on it from one their many illegal wiretaps, and we had strange people sniffing around our door.
We got letters, then visits from agents, then finally court orders telling us we had to give up our kids.
That’s when we came here, a long time retreat in the hills, we figured we’d need someday after some protest went wrong.
We have quite a stock of arms and supplied, and figured we could hold out until someone stopped hunting for us.
But this time we know the government isn’t going to let up so easily.
They want our kids and will kill us to get them.
Meanwhile, our kids are getting ever smarter.
One just invented interstellar drive.
We don’t know how long we can hold out against the government here or whether we can hold back the assault at all.
Bill thinks if we can keep them back long enough the kids might invent something which we can use to escape.
I’m not so sure.
Some kids are still a little year and I fear they might blow up the universe before they come up with anything we can use.
The government seems to be thinking along the same lines, which is why they’ve decided to rush us now rather than wait until our supplies expire.
The government probably wouldn’t mind killing us all if it means keeping our kids out of the wrong hands. Can you imagine if we actually came up with something that upset the world’s power structure, and our kind actually became more powerful than their kind and started transforming the world into all those things we said it ought to be?
Bill shouts. The enemy is coming.
I flick off the safety on my rifle and prepare to die fighting.
Meanwhile something is glowing very brightly green from one of the kids’ bedrooms.
Someone just says something about Mars when half our compound vanishes.
Those of us left are so stunned we don’t even fire a shot when the feds burst in on us.
The feds are stunned, too, staring at the vacant space where the bedrooms and our kids used to be.
Finally, the feds just shrug.
What’s the old saying: It’s all over except for the shouting.
Sooner or later, our kids are bound to come back.
The question is: what as?