I raised the real “whistleblowers”
Never mind what you’re seeing in the news. Forget the whispered guesses, suspicion, and surmising about who? And what? And when and where?
These are the original whistleblowers right here.
For years, their father and I have endured a veritable storm of whistleblowing. Pointing fingers, shouted charges, heated debates, and the turning of state’s evidence in a politically charged climate (everyone wants to be president, see) were the norm; the natural outcome of a fallen world where two sinners fall in love, get married, and make more. Sinners, that is.
“He wore my socks!” “He had three cookies!” “He hit me!” All of this just white noise interspersed by explosive belching, prolific scratching, and nuclear fog reminiscent of Hiroshima every time Taco Tuesday rolled around.
But I digress.
The Monkey Crisis of 2008 was one for the books. When a son with a vast monkey collection insisted on taking all of them to bed every night, war broke out. “I can’t sleep!” someone larger fumed. “I keep waking up with monkeys under my back!”
Ker-thunk went the wheels of the bus. Tweet-tweet went the whistle, and that quick, the Two-Monkey Rule was signed into law. No more than two monkeys in bed at one time, period. And a fragile kind of peace was restored.
Sometimes, the whistleblowing went the other way. From one floor up, I’d hear the rustle of the Doritos bag, followed by furtive crunching. “Get your hand out of the bag and put it back (and here, I’d name the perp).” Tweet-tweet. # busted
To the great dismay of our whistleblowers, their father picked a sharp one to ride shotgun. “Too bad,” I’d tell them after a successful bust, “that Dad didn’t marry someone slow and dull.” Then I’d howl, feed ’em a cookie, and send ’em off to bed.
Many days, out of nowhere, we’d have the Indy 500. Thundering feet could be heard in a circuit that ran around the dining room table and through the kitchen with a loop around the back room-bedroom-living room and back around the table again. Or a larger, more sinister loop out the front door, around the house, up and over the garage roof, through the upstairs bathroom window, down the stairs, and out the front door to do it all over again.
Tweet-tweet. Only this time, it was their dad. And suddenly, Fun Day wasn’t such fun anymore. # foiled
Raising whistleblowers is exhausting. Being one’s exhausting, too, but the fate of the free world hangs on our success. That, at least, is true for our small ecosystem here on The Three.
As an expert at wrangling those who blow whistles and at blowing them myself, I am offering my services to my country. I think I could set stuff straight. Call me at 1-800-555-AMOM.