This is a story that I heard long ago and has been a source of comfort to me when times were difficult. Considering the way things are now, I thought I would share it.
A man was walking through a forest. As forests go, it wasn't that impressive, some trees here, a couple of bushes there, maybe a butterfly or two if you looked hard enough. Unfortunately for this man, he happened upon the one tiger that made the forest its home. A chase began. The man was able to out pace the tiger for a time seeing as the tiger was only running for its dinner and had eaten a big breakfast that morning while the man was running for his life.
After a minute or so of panicked sprinting, the man came to the edge of a rather impressive cliff. With the tiger fast on his heals, the man decided leaping to his death was a more noble and extreme way to die. "Do the Dew!" he cried and off the cliff he went! But, one second into his plunge, he spied a vine and grabbed it. The vine held his weight and the man swung gently back and forth with the slavering tiger pacing along the cliff's edge above him.
"What luck!" thought the man, "I can climb down the vine to safety and get away from this stupid tiger." At that moment, the man looked down, and there, pacing at the bottom of the cliff, was another tiger, as ravenous as the first.
"Ah, crap." The man thought, "Well, this vine is sturdy, maybe I can wait out the tigers." With that, the man wrapped part of the vine around his hand and began his long wait. Not five minutes into his new plan, the man heard a sound, two mice had come out of their hiding place in the cliff wall and were chewing on the vine. At the rate they were chewing, the vine would snap within minutes.
"I CANNOT CATCH A BREAK!" The man thought in all caps. "What do I do now?" Looking around, he saw, growing out of the cliff side, a strawberry bush, and there, in the bush, was the largest, reddest, ripest, juiciest strawberry he had ever seen. The man immediately was filled with calm. He reached out his hand and plucked that strawberry. Staring at its beauty for just a moment, he raised his arm...and threw that strawberry as hard as he could at the tiger below him. The strawberry hit the tiger in the eye and blinded it. While the tiger pawed at its face, the vine snapped and the man shot to the ground like a rocket, landing on the tiger. The tiger was killed instantly, the man suffered a minor sprain to his right ankle.
That night, the man and his family enjoyed tiger steaks, and later on in the evening he made sweet love to his wife in front of the fireplace on their new tiger skin rug.
The End
So, in today's terms, Progressives are the man, and like him, we're just trying to make our way through the forest, which represents health care. The tigers, of course, represent Republicans constantly chasing us down, trying to devour our hopes and dreams. The cliff is where we are now. The moral of the story? Grow strawberries and throw them at Republicans! And while those jerks are wiping strawberry juice and seeds out of their eyes, we will pass, not just a public option, BUT SINGLE PAYER! This will break the tiger's back and make our walk through the forest a little less scary.
I hope this story has given some of you the same inspiration it gave me when I heard it many years ago...back when the tiger was Ronald Reagan and the Strawberry was the Star Wars missile defense program. Have a wonderful Saturday everyone :).
P.S. It occurs to me that some of you may be animal rights activists or animal lovers and may balk at the idea of a rare and noble animal like a tiger being killed in my story...would it help if I said the tiger that died was also a racist? Because he totally was.