That Goddamned Locket

A locket.

A goddamned locket.

That’s what started this.

Not the election. Not the bills, the laws, not even the jack-booted Storm Troopers.

A goddamned locket.

Our pain, our torment, our struggle, none of it began when historians will say it did (if history is permitted to continue at all!). No, it was well before the pillars of democracy were torn down, before the treads and boots ground them to dust. For history counts only the actions of men and neglects all else. But evil long has a mind before it has hands and teeth.

And long before it has a mind, it has a heart.

The story of our Great Leader does not begin at his ascension to the presidency, nor does it even begin at his birth. No, somewhere between him learning to crawl and being handed the nuclear launch codes, the man we know as Adam Nessler was born.

This man, despite winning the lottery at birth, could not have gotten further than greeting customers at one of his father’s dealerships had it not been for her. For if behind every great man is a great woman then what is behind every blood-thirsty tyrant?

A fool with every resource betrothed to a witch with singular intent.

Without her he was a smile and a wave.

Without him she was bored.

I do not mean Adam Nessler was innocent in the stamping out of all freedoms and life on our planet. It was not his incompetence alone that placed myself, along with millions, into the cold, desolate camps we currently reside. No, he is to blame as well, for even a fool does not go where he does not wish to go...at least without a fight. In short, she could only have gotten so far without him.

No, they were a pair and should be judged as such. Could there ever be a more dangerous chemistry than unearned power coupled with unquenchable thirst?

Two of a kind: the unwitting and the insatiable.

Some people should not love…Should not be allowed to! Some people do not deserve it! Not if they only serve to empower the corrosive evil of the other! To allow it to overflow to the entirety of the world itself!

And how they loved to flaunt it! It was not enough to have in abundance all the material needs so many lacked! No! On every occasion granted to them, they had to gleefully put on display to the world their love, as they called it. Each interview, each speech, as he sat back smiling and waving like a dime-store clown, she would slither up to the camera with that damned, accursed thing dangling just above the crevice of her breasts! That goddamned locket!

“The thing that brought us together, what truly solidified our love.”

The same story over and over and over, his grandmother’s heart-shaped locket, the one thing the Gestapo had not found. How a symbol of the human spirit could become the scourge of the entire human race is a cruel irony.

Alas, I have no more paper with which to ascribe this letter to no-one. Nor am I Saul of Tarsus, Martin Luther King Jr., or Solzhenitsyn. I cannot forgive nor empathize with my captors...and I will see no justice.

In simpler times there was the question: if given means to traverse time, would you do whatever it took to stop such men from attaining power? I now know I would. Not only to stop the horror that has ravaged our world but because it would not require much from me. There’d be no blood on my hands. It wouldn’t take anything as dramatic as strangling a future tyrant as he suckled at his mother’s breast. No, all it would take is for me to purchase, or even simply steal, or break, one stupid locket before it could do its damage.

One goddamned locket.