For those of you reading this, congratulations on surviving the nuclear apocalypse that has surely taken place between the time this was written and the time it was published. I’m sure there can be no one who doesn’t know this by now, but for the few whose underground bunkers have lost communication with the outside world (but who also have received their Campus Times subscription in a timely manner), here’s what happened: Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee company upon which all civilization rests, introduced its new holiday-season cup.
What could Starbucks have possibly put on or in this cup to provoke the War to End All Wars? Did the cup have a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad? Did it have a Trump-toupee and call Putin a loser? Did Starbucks accidentally print the launch codes for the nuclear weapons corporate America keeps hidden underneath the Mall of America? No, the cup…was red.
Oh the humanity!
Yes, as Karl Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” over 150 years ago, “The final and most glorious uprising will pit the proletariat against the greatest of all enemies created by the bourgeois. The beginning will be marked by the removal of generic secular winter images from the public spaces.” By removing reindeer and snowflakes from their cups, Starbucks has single-handedly sealed our fate as slaves to the Red Menace that is China and also Russia (and probably ISIS).
“This cup, which is Christmas-colored-but-slightly-less-Christmas-themed-than-last-year, is a literal threat to my religion, my freedom and my country,” proclaimed a man calling himself “Dino,” who may have been using a pseudonym to protect his identity but was also stomping around roaring with his arms tucked into his sleeves before and after the interview. Between rampages, he managed some more English.
“Thomas Jefferson wrote the Second Amendment for this exact moment. He knew China and Russia would invade and try to take away our religion, so he made sure to put it in the Constitution that America is a country founded explicitly on Christian gun-ownership and excessive portion sizes.” It should be noted that Dino’s outrage was not enough to prevent him from buying his venti-decaf-mocha-double shot-extra whip-nonfat-soy-half and half-extra hot-light ice-hold the mocha-occino.
Some took a more nuanced approach to the Starbucks Sin, such as Lynn Murray, a frequent Starbucks customer who said, “I read America’s official religious doctrine once, the original text written by George Washington. Somewhere between the paragraph about what Bible passages we have to be weirdly adherent to and the paragraph about being super worried about other people’s sex lives, I think there was something about Jesus loving others. It’s a hazy memory, but I think maybe Jesus would be OK with the Starbucks cup, assuming he even heard about it while he was out helping the poor with their actual problems. Either way, I think it’s important that we willfully ignore that and use Jesus as a cudgel with which to bash people whom we don’t like.”
So, Merry Christmas everyone.May all of Jesus’s favorites survive the communist hellscape that Starbucks has condemned us to.
Franklin is a member of
the class of 2017.
