Letting Go

Yesterday I heard a story that my friend told me had been around for a long time. Maybe you’ve heard it. It makes an important point.

In Africa, when trappers wish to get a shipment of monkeys for the zoos they would simply take a lot of long-necked bottles out and set them in a clearing.  In those bottles they put nuts which the monkeys could not resist.  Then the trappers would go back to their campsites and play poker.

Later when they returned, they would find a monkey attached to each jar. The monkeys had smelled those sweet, succulent nuts and reached into those jars with their little paws. The monkeys each grabbed a fistful of nuts and then, when they tried to pull their arm out, the neck of the bottle was too small for them with their fist full of nuts. All the monkeys had to do to recapture their freedom was let go of the nuts, but they were all captured.

I have been listening to a lot of the candidates for office here in North Carolina and reviewing just what has been happening in Washington, D.C. for far too long. With no stretch of my imagination at all I can picture our representatives in both the Senate and the House and in the oval office too. It just seems like everyone in Washington has their fists stuck in some sort of a long necked bottle and no one can escape.

Maybe we should march on Washington with sledge hammers and break up all of those bottles, give everyone a free ticket home and start out all over again. Free those political prisoners in Washington…the senators, the members of the house, the whole bunch of them. Vote!