Kory’s Kolumn

Conservatives are selfish and callous, and liberals are depraved hedonists.
All right! Who do we still have reading? Are you still with me? Not too offended, I hope. My intentions were merely to weed out the readers whose hackles get raised when someone disagrees with them, because today, we’re going to talk about politics.
Wait! Please, come back! Trust me, you’ll want to read this. I promise, there will be no shower of personal opinions, and no more name-calling.
Dick Cheney is a troll who feeds on the smiles of small children, and Nancy Pelosi looks like she was weaned on bottles of concentrated lemon extract.
OK, OK, I’m sorry. That was it. Really, folks, today I just want to say something about The Gray Area. Many Americans, especially those Americans who are currently or have been in positions of power, are unaware that this area exists. No, it is not a section of land in North Dakota, and no, it is not an aerial view of a Republican committee (rimshot!). The Gray Area is a wide, comfy, happy field between the barbed towers of Black and White, where few politicians dare roam. And when I say black and white, I am not referring to race.
To better illustrate what the Gray Area is, let me offer a scenario. A huddled, impoverished newlywed couple secretly crosses the border from Quebec to pursue religious freedoms and economic opportunities in a safer country which has more professional sports teams to entertain them. They establish themselves here in Ogden, and their children are born here and raised in our public schools.
One day at work, the father is around the water cooler, and he doesn’t laugh when someone quotes a line from Friends. His illegal immigrant status is discovered, and the police swarm in and give him a vicious test to prove his citizenship, which includes the names of all the American Idol judges and a recitation of at least one quote from a Bruce Willis movie. When he asks if Die Hard is actually a German art film, he is fired, and he’s shipped back to Canada with his wife. His children are kicked out of school dispassionately.
These kids are now poor, uneducated Canadamericans (Americanadaners?) who can’t rejoin their parents because their French is extremely limited and they aren’t even able to see the hockey puck without high-definition television. And because they’re not allowed to continue studying, they turn to a life of reckless crime and overacting here in our country. Which, subsequently, is how we got Jim Carrey.
Now, this is obviously an exaggerated story (Jim Carrey isn’t even really from Canada; he rose out of the sea like Godzilla), but the point remains, and it can be applied to issues like abortion, gun ownership, rights for ex-convicts and health care reform, among others. In our country, where narrow-minded radicals are hogging the hilltops and spiteful extremists are mugging the microphones, we are not allowed to harvest our opinions from the fields of Gray. Our opinions can only be red and blue ones. We’re allowed to think that either this entire family should be crammed in a giant slingshot and flung back to le North, or they should be given their own U.S. mint. Nothing in between. To some, anything in the middle is irresponsible. Compromise is for weak individuals.
Well, folks, this isn’t working. We’re just taking our ball and going home.
Those of us in the Gray Area see a family of real humans who were tired of Canadian imperialist oppression (or maybe they were just bad at curling), and they saw better lives for their family in a different country. So they crossed the border, knowing it was against the law, and started their new lives here. And then they got caught. Should they have done it? No, probably not. Would I have done it if it were my impoverished family and we preferred real bacon to Canada’s wrongly titled ham (you can probably tell by now I’m running out of Canada jokes)? I believe there’s no way of knowing the answer to that.
So, I think we should treat these people with merciful justice, which I know is an oxymoron, but I don’t care. Maybe we deal with the fact that they’re already here and give them a stiff fine. Maybe we just make our borders tighter to prevent future problems. But if we just try and see these political situations as people situations, and build condos in the Gray Area, our country will start to improve.
That being said, I am in favor of deporting Jim Carrey. Back to the deep, foul demon!