My friends, it’s become clear that our government is losing its grip on a very serious problem, and it’s high time somebody took a stand about it. How many of our diplomats have to be publically embarrassed? How many family members have to endure weeks or months of psychological torture? How long will we stand idly by and let companies like Vasque, The North Face and Patagonia profit from the foolish curiosity of our nation’s youth?
I’m talking about, of course… the American Hiker. This species, this… perversion of the classic American outdoorsman had previously been contained to wholesome, safe, North American backwoods hiking destinations. But it seems the reckless cultural legacy of the baby boom generation has combined with modern technology to allow the American Hiker to spread across the planet unchecked.
This MUST stop, before each and every one of us has a friend or relative being held by a Hennessy addict or fundamentalist cleric.
Let’s backtrack a bit to the late 60’s when the phenomenon began. As the baby boom generation came of age after deprived childhoods full of the tyranny and oppression of ‘rules’ and ‘the establishment’, millions of them did not discover sunlight and open spaces until their college years. Then when they left home for college, much like Clean in ‘Apocalypse Now’, “…the light and the space put the zap on their heads…”. Our young graduates would leave their university years with a boiling drive to… Go Somewhere. The average hippie-liberal-douche college graduate was never much of a threat until the sheer numbers of the boom generation forced their species to seek ever-farther-flung hiking destinations simply to avoid bumping into each other.
Seriously, how useful is a PhD dissertation on the pollinating patterns of the Upper-Mongolian Steppe desert prairie grass flower if you’re only 1 of dozens of hippies pursuing that doctorate?
So a pattern of wider distribution had already been established. Thankfully, the stock market boom of the 80’s and 90’s mostly drained the financial base of the American Hiker, but the latest recession has obviously caused an unfortunate upsurge in hiking activities. Let’s face it, gorp and sturdy boots are easy for hikers to afford now.
The truly enabling ingredient in all this is the mobile social networking device, which the typical Hiker seems adept at using. A sort of hippie one-upsmanship seems to fuel their wanderlust, as trips to Canada are bested by e-mails from the Kenyan bush, topped by updates from the North Korean/Chinese border, which are dwarfed by Twitters from the Kurdistan/Iranian border. This is a curiosity to many hippie-watchers, knowing that open competition over anything but Frizbee Golf seems to repel most hippies and Hikers alike. The interconnectivity between Hikers forces them to seek out more remote and dangerous locations for their bipedal activities, which may or may not be a factor in their ability to attract mates and breed. As we’ve seen recently in Iran, some Hikers choose to take their potential mates with them on their dangerous hiking missions just to see rocks and plants that nobody from their college has ever seen before. Add to this craziness that some news organizations will pay actual money to these misguided bloggers under the guise of ‘freelance journalism’, a phrase loosely translated into Farsi or Korean as ‘CIA operative’.
This is insanity. Hiking in these areas of our planet is the equivalent of standing directly in front of an armed terrorist, wildly flailing your hands inches from his face & screaming “I’m not touching you!!! I double DOG dare ya!!”. Our enemies might be doing us a favor by enforcing a ‘One Hiker, One Bullet’ policy, and removing them from the gene pool. But of course the American Hiker makes for a very valuable bargaining chip if you happen to be negotiating with the American government for more Hennessy, or if you’re straight up, clinically beernuts insane.
All is not lost, however. With a little effort, America can contain it’s Hiker epidemic and save future youths from a fate of weeks in a guest house abroad, Iranian interrogations, etc. First and foremost we must stop sending our children to college. These so-called institutions of education serve only to open young minds and vomit pails of useless curiosity into their brains, which they’ve gotta satiate somehow, somewhere. Complete ignorance and a blindly misguided belief that America is the only country worth seeing will keep our kids on our shores where they belong.
Another good idea floating through the halls of congress currently is mandatory obesity guidelines for all young Americans of hiking age. It’s the nationwide health movement that’s allowed the most radical hikers to wreak havoc on our American consciousness and actually get to these remote locations, so a program of forced cheeseburger consumption might just be in order.
So to our wayward youth, and specifically Laura Ling, Euna Lee, Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bower… Stay Home. Stay home and surf the internet to learn more about the world. Play some Wii ‘Hiker’ instead. Hours of walking in place in front of a 52-inch LCD should be good enough for any true American. Leave the hiking activities to the communists and Bedouin nomads. Lewis & Clark did all the hiking any American should ever have to do… what do you think a taxi is for, anyway?
