You Told Me So

You never hold the elevator when people ask you to. You pretend you don’t hear them, or you pretend to press the “open door” button when you’re really pushing the “close door” button. You don’t want to be stuck with those people in awkward silence for thirty seconds while you ascend to your floor. Also, you figure you’re in a hurry to get where you’re going and can’t spare the extra seven seconds to wait for some slowpokes.

When walking behind an elderly couple, you double your pace to get ahead of them, so they don’t slow you down.

When entering a store, you might push the door a little wider for the person behind you, but you won’t hold the door open and allow them to enter first. Unless they’re attractive. In that case, you wedge your foot against the door to prop it open and give a slight nod as they pass. You want them to notice how kind you are; how polite. Really, though, you’re just waiting to catch a glimpse of their ass.

When there’s a long line in the “exit only” lane on the freeway, you cut in at the last minute. You figure you’ve had a hard day at work and deserve the extra twenty minutes at home in front of your TV; never mind the five dozen people you cut off, adding precious minutes to the time they’re separated from their loved ones.

When you don’t want to attend a class, you hope the professor has fallen ill or broken a bone. It’s nothing against the professor; you just want a reason to skip class without feeling guilty.

You’re also secretly attracted to certain authority figures. You wish their spouses would die so you could comfort them. You wouldn’t be offended if they took advantage of you. You’d be a little bit honored.

When having sex with your lover, you sometimes think about their attractive friends. You imagine threesome scenarios initiated by your partner, so you can claim to be just going along with your lover’s wishes, when really you’re living out your fantasies.

When you pass the folks waiting at the bus stop, you wonder why they can’t get their finances in order and save enough money to buy a car. They should have stayed in school and gotten a real job, like me, you think.

You drive past the homeless on exit ramps, holding their signs, with your eyes focused intently on the horizon. You keep your windows rolled shut; maybe turn the radio up.

You drive past lemonade stands the same way.

If approached on the street by these bums, you lie. You pat your pockets weakly and claim you don’t have anything on you.

Sometimes cashiers give you incorrect change. When they give you too much, you pocket it happily: their poor math skills are your gain. When they shortchange you, you bitch and yell. You accuse them of cheating you. You don’t say anything, but you notice their foreign accents. You talk to their managers about the kind of thieving scum they’re hiring these days.

When you see a handicapped person, you don’t know where to look. You don’t want to stare, but you can’t imagine how they manage, and want to find out. You end up ignoring them completely, looking off into the distance above their head, which is made slightly easier by the fact that they’re sitting in a wheelchair.

You don’t have anything against gays, exactly. You just don’t want them to rub it in your face. You don’t really care what they do in the privacy of their own homes; you just don’t want to see it. You think it’s gross.

You’re bitter that there isn’t a White History Month, or a White Entertainment Television channel (WET), or scholarships specifically for smart white kids. You think it’s messed up that the standards for becoming a National Achievement Scholar are so much lower if you’re black than becoming a National Merit Scholar if you’re white, and are even lower if you’re a National Hispanic Achievement Scholar. You think all this affirmative action crap is just taking jobs from deserving, qualified white people and giving them to undereducated minorities, and all this PC BS is for liberal sissies.

You don’t understand restitution at all. You think, why should we have to pay blacks because their great grandparents were slaves? You don’t think you should have to pay at all: you didn’t own any slaves.

You don’t understand why you can’t hit a girl. You don’t physically abuse women, but you think it’s unfair that they say they want to be treated like equals, but still want to hold on to a few special privileges; like “ladies first” and the man paying for dinner.

You sometimes wish the car in front of you would spin out and somersault into the ditch, simply because you’ve never seen an accident before, and you’re bored.

You grin a little when smokers cough. You’re smarter than they are. You’re not pissing your life away at four dollars a pack. You know the dangers; so do they. If they don’t heed the warning, they deserve what they get. You’re fine with that, just so long as they stay away from you while they do it. You shouldn’t have to die for their recklessness.

Of course you’d never admit any of this. You just tuck it away in the recesses of your consciousness, like the vague sexual attraction you felt for your cousin years ago. You know it’s wrong, in the sense that it’s socially unacceptable, but you’d thought it just the same, despite yourself.



And when the apocalypse comes, when all the oil has been burned, and the ice caps have melted, and the coasts have flooded, and the crops won’t grow, and the animals are dying out species by species, and the people have wars over caches of Twinkies and cans of refried beans, and the planet itself is dying slowly, becoming another arid rock orbiting some random star in some random galaxy, you’ll feel a little smug.

You’ll know, deep down, that you saw this coming. Not that you did anything to stop it, or even warned anyone about it. You still drove your SUV. You only recycled if you found a recycling bin before you found a trash can. You cranked up the heat all winter and the AC all summer. You drove across town to save thirteen cents on a gallon of gas. But, when the environmentalist pussies said that global warming was imminent, you conceded, this could possibly happen, maybe.

You didn’t learn how to hunt without gunpowder. You didn’t build an earth pod high in the mountains with a generator and enough rations for a year. You didn’t study agricultural techniques like irrigation, organic composting, crop rotation, and soil enrichment. You can’t even start a fire without lighter fluid.

You will, however, hold over my head the belief that you saw it coming while we scour ghost towns for sustenance, search abandoned suburbs for survivors, and slowly starve; the inches around our waists dropping as quickly as the hair falling out of our scalps, and the molar you found resting in your hand instead of in your mouth when you woke up one morning. You’ve proclaimed yourself an atheist, but in the toughest times you find yourself begging for help, though you can’t figure out whom, exactly, you’re begging for mercy. Despite all the pain, and anguish, and depression, and sense of utter hopelessness, you’ll know that “you told me so.”

As if that were enough.