Please Don’t Send Me Any Anthrax Through The Mail

I remember a time when every morning I would rise starry-eyed and skip to the mailbox to see what wondrous communiqués had arrived from the outside world. Ah, those innocent, halcyon days of yore! Of course once I became a card-carrying adult my mail slowly mutated into an endless influx of bills and solicitations and special offers, but at least it was safe to open the damn mailbox. I was okay with safe. I no longer required a great deal of excitement from my mail; I didn’t need an adrenaline rush from opening a questionable package with no return address.

Well, now we’ve got this jihad thing. To avoid any semblance of journalistic bias I’m not going to expound on my personal opinions on the relative fairness of targeting an entire nation of civilians in a self-proclaimed holy war. But I will take a stand on this other issue: I am against sending people anthrax through the mail. Besides the fact that it is in egregious violation of the Postal Code, it just seems like a bad idea.

You might say this business of sending dangerous objects through the mail is nothing new—the Unabomber and all that. Now I’m not in favor of mail-bombs by any means, but they do seem a little more sporting than dusting a letter with white anthrax powder. It’s like the difference between conventional and biological warfare.

And old Ted’s victims were carefully chosen according to his neo-Luddite philosophies (which I’m sure he would be only too happy to elaborate on if you cared to become his prison pen pal—on second thought, not a good idea.) It seems that the mail-order anthrax thing is targeted to anyone of my particular nationality.

I mean, come on, anthrax? What did I ever do to you guys, besides tacitly supporting the standing socio-economic order of rampant global capitalism and Third World exploitation? Okay, so I filled up my car with gas the other day and ordered a tennis racket over the Internet. Does that merit a death sentence? It’s not like I volunteered to be a Christian missionary to Afghanistan. Now I can see how that might offend some people. But hey, guys, I’m with you—hell, I’m even left-leaning enough to question the brutality of Israeli armed forces firing at Palestinian civilians. How about that? Sounds good, right? Doesn’t sound like someone you need to anthrax, does it? In fact, being anthraxed would DEFINITELY tend to prejudice me against just those issues that fundamentalist Islamic extremists like yourselves hold dear. So please, no diseases through the mail. I have enough to worry about with West Nile and cat scratch fever.

(P.S. If, by any chance, the current mass mailing of communicable pathogens is being carried out by anti-government white survivalists or some other non-Islamic group, then by all means I am very open to considering any and all viewpoints. Just don’t mail me any...literature, okay?)