The Way It Could Have Been

by Bob Wallace 

Hijacker:  This is a hijacking!  I have a boxcutter!  

Grandma:  Well, I don't have a box!  Instead, I have this!  (whips out a pistol and points it at hijacker)  Now reach for the sky, or I'll put a hole in your pointy little head!  

Hijacker:  (mouth dropping open)  What?  This is not going according to plan!  Americans are not allowed to carry handguns on airplanes!  I thought the liberals took away your firearms and your gonads!  

Grandma:  What alternate universe do you live in?  This is America , land of the free and home of the brave!  And the armed!  

Bureaucrat:  Wait! Everyone listen to me!  I'm from the government and I'm here to help you!  Just put away your handguns and surrender! Do what they tell you!  There won't be any trouble if you just act like sheep!  

Grandma:  Shut you, you worthless idjit!  (smacks bureaucrat on top of his head, which causes him to cry like a girl)  Anyone who listens to anything said by anyone from the government deserves exactly what they get!  

Hijacker:  Surrender!  We are going to fly these planes into the World Trade Center , the Pentagon and the White House!  

Grandma:  Bringing a knife to a gunfight, huh!  

Hijacker:  My faith will protect me!  

Grandma:  (BLAM!)  Oh yeah?  

Hijacker:  AIEEEE!!  (claps hands over hole in forehead)  The 72 raisins await me!  (topples over, exits)  

Second hijacker:  Imams preserve us!  An 85-year-old woman with a .357 Colt Python loaded with frangible Magsafes and Glaser Safety Slugs, that will explode inside us making horrible and fatal wounds, but will not penetrate aircraft window glass or the fuselage!  I believe we should surrender!  

Grandma:  On the floor or I blow off little achmed!  

Hijackers (clapping their hands over their little achmeds)  Woe is us!  Surely we can not win in this dreadful situation, considering that everyone has handguns pointed at us and evil looks in their eyes!  We surrender most certainly!  

Passengers (chorus):  Oh, really?  

Osama bin Laden:  Dang it!  My plan to draw the US into a war so the entire Islamic world will hate them just fell apart!  Now I'll have to find another way to get America to bleed itself dry of blood and treasure!  Drats!  My nefarious plans foiled!  (looks pensive) But then, on the other hand, I'm not going to end up a pile of squashed bones under a mountain in Afghanistan !  

George Bush:  Ah, shoot.  Now I'll go down in history as a mediocre president with an untreated drinking problem who presided over a miniscule tax cut and some minor deregulation. (looks pensive)  Well, I guess that's better than being known as a fool who fell into Osama bin Laden's trap and started World War III, and got a bunch of Americans killed while wasting billions of dollars!  

Neocons:  Dang!  The jig is up!  Our insane leftist plans to conquer the Middle East to protect Israel just went up in smoke!  Next thing we'll be exposed as the traitors and spies that we really are! (looks pensive)  On the other hand, at least we're not going to be exposed as the deluded crackpot chickenhawk armchair general cowards that all of us really are!  (all start flapping their arms like chickens, going "buk buk buk").  

Father:  Hi, honey!  I'm home from my job at the World Trade Center !  

Wife:  Thank goodness!  A bunch of nuts tried to hijack four planes and fly them right into the building where you work!  The passengers shot a bunch of them and the rest surrendered!  

Father:  Wow!  I would have been killed!  Good thing those passengers were armed!  Why, 3000 people could have been killed had the hijackers succeeded!  

Daughter:  Daddy!  You're home!  

Father:  Yep, honey, safe and sound, thanks to the brave citizens of this wonderful country, who understand how utterly foolish and worthless the government really is.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right honey?  

Daughter:  Yay for America , and for real Americans!  And  for .357 Colt Pythons!