Fraters Libertas

What Would Rudy Boschwitz Do?

Last night I was in my kitchen preparing my sumptuous evening repast when a commotion from the back window caught my eye. A closer look revealed elderly neighbors in the alley making doddering laps around their automobile, sprinkling salt in front of all four tires. Further review showed their vehicle's back end planted in a snow bank up to its wheel wells. Immediately it became clear that their attempts to use salt to gain their freedom were fated to be as successful as gaining peace in our time by handing away our strategic advantage in offensive weaponry via a one-sided, non-verifiable treaty with a bunch of lying, cheating communists. (Blogger winces at simile, notes time limitations and extreme difficulty of identifying further applicable salt references, goes boldly forward).

Thanks to the standard five minute wait-for-a-miracle-to-transpire delay on direct action, I was able to finish my beer and then gallantly head on down to help them out. Nice, sweet old people. Both very happy to see me. The old man, a retired doctor no less, even insisted on helping me push, despite his wife's repeated counsel of: "Harold no! You're 82-years-old with a heart condition!"

I hope when I'm 82 years old with a heart condition I'll still have the lucidity and will to ignore my wife's nagging mollycoddling. And Harold, God bless him, would not be dissuaded from the task at hand. He was beside me the whole time with his shoulder to the rear bumper as we moved that stuck Subaru sedan, through sheer brute force alone, right out of that snow bank.

Truth be told, I didn't need Harold's help to do the job. I could have pushed it out on my own. But respecting his needs as man to not be shown as helpless in the eyes of his woman, I didn't call him off. In fact, I even eased back on my efforts, allowing Harold to do most of the heavy lifting himself. Only upon hearing him painfully groan and say "my heart feels like its being pulled through my ribs!" did I resume my pushing in earnest. Call me a great humanitarian if you will, but that's just the kind of guy I am.

So the car was freed, Harold and Prudence beamed, we all shook hands. Then, just as I was turning to leave, still warm from the glow of neighborly goodness, I glanced at their rear bumper. And I was confronted by a little rectangular forrest green tormentor.

A "Wellstone!" bumper sticker. I paused. Furled my brow. And began an internal debate over the merits of marching round to the front of their Subaru and with a shove depositing it back into the snow bank's frigid embrace.

I won't lie to you, the debate was a close one. Believe me, under these circumstances there are some compelling and perfectly logical, moral arguments for stranding two elderly people in the snow on a cold winter's night. But in the end I couldn't do it. I simply wished them a pleasant evening and strolled away.

That, my friends, is the definition of a compassionate conservative.

Epilogue: I don't have a digital camera, so proper photographic documentation of this event is lost to history. And with it I fear my nomination as one of Eleven Who KARE. But, as an aid the more unimaginative among you, Harold and Prudence look something like this.