Look guys, I don’t want to come off as a whiner here. You know me, I’m not one to complain unduly. But something’s been on my mind, and I think I owe it to myself and all of you to just get it out in the open. I don’t want to come across as a jerk here, but frankly, I’m peeved. I just can’t believe that we built that time machine and then forgot to kill Hitler.
I have no interest in playing the blame game. I’m not trying to single anyone out; we all could have been more on the ball. Believe me, I understand that having a new time machine can be exciting and distracting. Roger wanted to see a brontosaurus—cool, I get that. Deborah was dying to meet Jane Austen. Not really my thing, but I was supportive. But would it have been such a hassle, somewhere in our adventures hurtling through time, to have stopped off and assassinated Adolf Hitler? I don’t think so.
As I said, I’m not here to point fingers. However, if we’re being completely honest, I did give a couple of gentle reminders vis-à-vis our Hitler-killing situation. When we visited Elizabethan England to make sure Shakespeare really wrote all those plays, I mentioned that maybe there were more pressing matters at hand. When we traveled to ancient Rome to learn about Caligula, I suggested that there might be a better use of our time. And I don’t even want to talk about the hours we spent dicking around in the 1400s, looking for Robin Hood. Turns out he was a myth—unlike Hitler, who, thanks to our procrastinating, remains a genuine historical figure.
I feel like we’ve forgotten why we invented a time machine in the first place. We’ve forgotten what got us through the long days reading dense quantum physics books and sweating over a hot flux capacitor. It wasn’t about driving an original 1963 Ford Thunderbird, or seeing how Breaking Bad turns out. No, it was about hunting down and annihilating the man who would become Germany’s Führer. The whole thing makes me want to travel back in time to when we first built this time machine and give us a stern talking-to on the importance of following through on what you start.
And don’t give me that “you’ll create a paradox and unravel the fabric of the universe” crap, because if you guys were really concerned with responsibility, we would have killed Hitler ages ago.
Hey, Splitsider, it’s Matt—your contributor, Matt Crowley. You know that new Twitter feed you’ve been looking for? Well, listen to this!
The Humor Section features a piece of original humor writing each week. To submit, send an email to Brian Boone.
