I’m madder than a kosher pickle in a falafel over the cancellation of school graduations because of these woke Palestinian protests!!!
Why just the other day I received a notification from my Moscow community college cooking class that they would be moving our graduation online on account of the Israeli genocide protests on campus.
“Just pretend it’s the pandemic,” my wife Greta quips, as I slipped a western omelet on her plate.
“Is that the answer for everything now?” I rolled my eyes. “Just go back to the days of the greatest psyop in the history of the world.” I checked on my lasagna, which I would be presenting to my online class in a few hours.
“It’s just a graduation,” Greta assured me.
But it wasn’t just a graduation. When I was at UCLA Film School (Go Bruins!) writing a sitcom about a young girl named Funky who lived with an old man in a Chicago apartment that was just a graduation. A piece of paper, so to speak, for my future profile in the Hollywood Reporter.
This year was supposed to be different.
Can GWU! Spot the Difference?
This year I was looking forward to standing proudly on stage while a B-list food network celebrity gave a commencement speech. Just me and 12 other boomers who 16 weeks ago didn’t know how to turn on an oven, were now putting warm meals into brave volunteer stomachs.
But I digress (or is that digest!), the Israeli genocide on those Palestines beach front properties is outrageous. Even in my Moscow cul-de-sac the tension is unpalatable. Flags for Israel, flags for Palestine, and flags for Ukraine. Where are the American flags? The current thing has become a constant point of contention in the dog park or during one of Mr. Lee’s backyard BBQs, but nobody is speaking about how much that BBQ is costing.
Somebody needed to do something for my fellow boomers. I fired up my Lenovo Thinkpad and wrote to the school president. Apparently I wasn’t the only one as the email bounced. So I marched down to his hoity-toity office on the hill, but couldn’t get through as the Quad was full of quads wearing Palestinian head scarfs, pitching tents, and waving placards with more typos than a first year English exam.
Out of University and into Fakeology
“The thing is,” I ask my family over dinner later that night, “how does a foreign conflict affect us?” This is a dupe by George Soros to get Sleepy Joe out of the election, or another lockdown exercise to make us all get our wallets implanted in our wrists.”
“Oh, Toby, give it a rest,” Greta scolded me in the simple, trusting way only a lovely sheep could.
“It’s all fake,” I yelled, as I chewed on my delicious lasagna. “A+,” I mumbled.
The following day, I stayed online with my classmates. We agreed that what Israel was doing was crazy, but nothing new and nothing we’d never seen before. We also agreed that this might be our last graduation ever and to cancel it was a slap in the face to every boomer trying to learn a new skill that they would only have a few years left to use.
“I’ll host it,” I offered.
Graduation: Spicy Gaza Style!
I rented chairs, a lectern, invited the class and their friends, and with the help of my inkjet printer and some preprinted degree templates from Staples. I was ready to shout, ‘That was easy!!!’ I even got hold of celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, who agreed to speak, but later canceled, saying he was standing in solidarity with Gaza. BAM!
When the big day arrived, there was a small group of white women in Keffiyehs on my front lawn, but I quickly hosed them down and they scattered. That was even easier!
One by one the class received their diplomas, as my son, a cellist, played Pomp and Circumstance, but in the end I didn’t receive one. Much like my days at UCLA, I had been so focused on the future that I had forgotten to hand in my final assignment. (No clue what happened to that sitcom I wrote.) This time, however, I forgot to cook my final exam and because of that I will be spending another year in cooking school.
Hopefully next year the current thing will make a little more sense.
