In Varietate Unitas?

by Madeleine Kando

Once upon a time there was a large family with lots and lots of children. They were always fighting with each other and causing a lot of trouble. One of the children, whose name was Germaine, was a little bigger than the others and quite aggressive by nature. She wanted all the other children’s toys, so she broke into their respective rooms, beat up the children and stole their toys.

A distant uncle by the name of Sam, didn’t like what was happening in that family and decided to put an end to it. He went over there and kicked some ass until Germaine had to run back to her room with her tail between her legs, so to speak.

After Germaine was duly punished, the children realized that they had made a mess of things, always fighting and breaking things. It would be in everyone’s best interest if they were nicer to each other. So three of the children by the name of Ben, Ned and Lex started a Fan Club. At first only a few of the children joined, but as they saw that being a member of the Fan Club had many advantages, like access to good restaurants, good sports clubs and good hospitals, many of them wanted to join.

The rule was that you had to give up fighting though. And you had to behave yourself. In return you got lots of money to buy yummy food. One of the children, her name was Minerva, really liked to eat. She might even secretly have had an eating disorder, but no one really knows for sure.

After a while the other children noticed that Minerva had put on a lot of weight, but she didn’t look so good. She started to develop a tummy ache which, in turn, became a highly contagious stomach virus. The other children didn’t want to get infected, so they gave Minerva lots and lots of medicine and told her to stop eating so much. Minerva didn’t like being told what to do. She threw a temper-tantrum and threw up. That really got the infection going. Two of her brothers, Ira and Portnoy, became infected too and they also needed lots of medicine and were told to go on a very strict diet.

All this throwing up and trying to stick to a diet made the children even sicker. Soon two of the older children who were dubbed the ‘Merkozy’ twins took the lead in dictating the rules for this crisis. Another brother named Iain didn’t want anything to do with the epidemic (yes, it had become an epidemic by this time) and said that he wasn’t going to go on a diet OR take the medicine. He stomped out the door never to be heard from again.

Eventually the whole family had turned into a sick-ward. Coughing, throwing up, gagging, the whole shebang. It eventually got so bad that a measure of last resort was taken. Remember good old Uncle Sam? Well, they asked him to come back and put an end to the mess once again. But alas, Uncle Sam had the runs himself. Caught a bug when he was asked to fix another problem somewhere else. So he was not able to help the sick family.

Everybody thought that most children would die or at least become very thin and debilitated. But then something strange happened. The virus took its toll, but once it got what it wanted from one child, it went on to another member of the family, giving the stronger children time to recover. Now the post-virus children were nice enough to take care of the pre-virus healthy children that were now infected.

They nursed each other back to health, and the Merkozy twins made sure that this time the rules for joining the Fan Club would be a lot stricter. Diets were immediately imposed on secretly bingeing Fan Club members and money for food was not doled out so freely any more. In the end, the family survived. Until the next stomach virus appears, but by then the children will have grown into adults. Who knows, maybe they will be wiser by then.. leave comment here