Neighbors, F***ing Neighbors

Before mobile phones.

Before the internet.

Before 171 channels of crap became available nationwide via coaxial cable.

I attended middle school.

Back then, for a good laugh, my friends and I called this odd phone number someone came across. This delivered unto us the first recorded phone message I ever heard that did not recite the time each ten seconds.

We learned about “the threat of the Jew,” about how all civilization would perish should this danger be allowed to fester and spread. That Nazi recording went on and on in a fashion you can almost certainly imagine.

Like I said, a good laugh. Because even barely out of grade school, we recognized the absurdity.

Yet, in June of 2023, early one morning, every driveway in our neighborhood, down the street from the synagogue to the west and the Catholic nunnery to the east — every driveway had fresh litter: Plastic bags, each with a dollop of sand for weight to be thrown from a car and a rolled print out of scorn toward, well, “the Jew.”

I didn’t laugh.

I thought this kind of nonsense would be gone by now.

None of which was fodder for this comic, but came to mind just now, as I set out to say something completely different.

Anyway, when every decade or so I hear the tired fiction “the Jews run everything,” I look at my life and the lives of most everyone I know, and I think — and sometimes say — if this were so, a lot of us ought to be giving thanks.