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Hartley: Take the daily not-gonna-kill-anyone pledge

Todd Hartley
I’m With Stupid

The other day I was rolling through Facebook, unfollowing anyone who posted more than once a day or took a selfie, and I came across a post that included a video and a hyperbolic proclamation along the lines of: “If everyone watched this one-minute film, there would be no war.”

The still shot from the video featured a smiling orangutan with one arm thrown over the shoulders of a pointer dog. I have a half-pointer, I’m a sucker for orangutans, and I’ve been trying to quit war for some time now, so I clicked on the arrow by the orangutan’s armpit and watched.

The film had a bunch of inter-species animal friends — for example: a tiger and a bear, a turtle and a hyrax, a horse and a goat, and dogs with deer, dolphins, parrots, cats, elephants, orangutans, etc. — and they were all frolicking happily away, not caring that their friend looked nothing like them.



The point was clear: If a hyrax and a turtle can be friends, I can get along with people who have “No Fear” stickers on the windows of their pickup trucks. And I gotta tell ya, it worked. I honestly and truly have no desire to make war anymore. I was indeed cured by that one-minute video. Thanks, horse and miniature goat!

The problem is that I wasn’t really making much war to begin with. In fact, of all the war being waged in the world right now, I was responsible for almost none of it. My giving up of war doesn’t seem to have solved much.




I still want to help achieve peace on Earth, though, so I figured I’d send friend requests to all the terrorists out there who are making war and then share the animal-friends video with them — but the post with the video somehow disappeared from my Facebook feed.

Argh! And I was so close to ending war, too. Dang it.

Actually, as much as I hate to say it, even if I did make friends with all those terrorists, and even if I did persuade them all to watch the video, I think there would probably still be war. I’d love to think I’m wrong, but let’s face it: Terrorists hate dolphins. Just because a giant fish swam with a dog doesn’t mean that infidels shouldn’t get blown to smithereens.

Thus, feeling that the video alone might not be enough to end war, I’ve devised a brilliant solution that is so simple I can’t figure out how no one else has thought of it yet. Here’s all we have to do: Everyone in the world, first thing in the morning after you get up, just say to yourself, “I promise not to kill anyone today.”

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Well, that and actually not killing anyone; it’s important to keep the promise once you’ve made it.

I figure, for the vast majority of people, this should be no problem. Not killing someone is usually pretty easy to do. I mean, sure, there are going to be occasional slip-ups when someone accidentally runs someone over or stabs someone 27 times, but as long as they didn’t mean to kill the person, I think we can say they adhered to the spirit of the promise.

And for the people out there who can’t promise not to kill anyone each day, all I can say is, “Watch the video. Then watch it again. Then watch it again. Then, after you’ve seen that goat trying to jump onto that horse’s back three times, if you still can’t promise not to kill anyone, just make sure the first person you kill each day is you.”

Great plan, right? But perhaps you’ve detected the flaw in my logic. I’m still dependent on the war-ending video, and as I mentioned, the video has mysteriously disappeared. I’m quite sure it’s a conspiracy by the military-industrial complex to keep the video from going viral and putting bomb manufacturers out of business.

So here’s where you come in: If you happen to see the video — if Big Brother hasn’t purged it from your feed yet — share it with all your terrorist friends and help put an end to war once and for all.

Oh, and a hyrax is kind of like an African gopher that’s the elephant’s closest relative because they have four toes, or something like that. The point is neither hyraxes nor elephants usually ride on the backs of turtles.

Other than the hyrax, Todd Hartley is the manatee’s closest cousin. To read more or leave a comment, visit http://zerobudget.net.