"You can attack me all you want Mr. Sayder," Conner turned towards Harry with a wicked smirk on his face. "But why won't you elaborate on how you intend to stop these attacks." Harry could make fun of Conner all he wanted, but Conner knew Harry had no coherent plan to stop terrorist from attacking us our soul.

Or maybe he did.

"It's simple," he shrugged his shoulders like a giant garage door opening and closing. "We're already restricting the Yemeni from coming into this country; next thing we have to do is make it so that no Muslims get in either."

Dundly tried taking back control. "Are you suggesting the U.S. ban Muslims from entering into the country?" Old age must be costing him his hearing too because Harry just answered that question no more than ten seconds ago.

"Yes," Harry affirmed. "These people are causing us a whole lotta trouble. Best if we keep the trouble away from us while we still can."

Conner stepped in. "Then what do you propose we do about the millions of good-standing Muslims who already live in the country? You plan to kick them out?"

"If it comes to it. For now they are not a problem, but if they were a problem, I'd take care of it."

"How?" Conner asked.

Caroline stepped in. "By sending them back to their home country of course. I have to say Mr. Sayder is correct. We can't have these Muslims coming into and destroying our country from within. Our Congress has made a right decision in barring the Yemeni from entering the country. It'll keep us much safer."

There it goes again—safer. The atrocities we commit for safety is so ironic. Bar a group of religious people from entering the country, people who are fleeing an unsafe place for a safer place, and we reject them because we want to keep our place safe. Conner fumed, I swear if I hear that word one more time...

Caroline added, "Mr. Knox, in a previous interview you talked about which one would we choose, safety or freedom? I have to say the answer is simple. Safety takes first priority over freedom, for how can a person be free if they are not secure in their own home?"

The crowd applauded. Conner wondered if it was the applause sign telling them to clap or if it was from their own doing. He'd be surprised if the zombies were actually doing something on their own for a change.

Conner sighed, preventing himself from imploding because of all the stupidity that was choking him. "Are you scared Caroline? Are you scared that this country, the world's most powerful nation who boasts a navy that could take on the globe, an air force that could fight aliens if they came to attack us, and an nuclear arsenal that could wipe out the world a thousand times over, is getting their asses handed to them by a couple raggedy terrorists who live in holes carved into mountains? Are you embarrassed that such a powerful nation cannot handle such a small force of radicals? Yet what is it that you do to combat this fear? You keep repeating the same mistakes: raise the defense budget, send troops overseas, occupy another Middle Eastern country, and then promise to leave in a couple of years but in all actuality we know the United States, once they have troops on the ground, never leave the place. Our presence will remain there indefinitely or until our empire collapses. Yet the more places we occupy, the more countries we attempt to liberate from theocracies and instill a democracy, the more enemies we make. I think that's what you guys want to do."

"Such wild accusations," Ferguson tagged in. "Are you a conspiracy theorist or something?" The crowd chuckled. "Come on, aliens, empire? Come back down to Earth Conner where we can reach you, not even Harry would say something like that."

The crowd laughed, including Harry. "Now that our little 'defender of conservatism' has said his piece. I should finish, before I was rudely interrupted, that Muslims have no place in this country. They are nothing but trouble. Let's send them back home where they belong."

Conner raised his hand in objection. "And what if they refused to be deported? What if they are U.S. citizens, who have only known America as their home? What will you do to them? Kick them to some foreign land? Group them in with people that look like them and believe in the same things as them and expect them to get along, past the language barrier..."

"Oh please," Harry interrupted. "They all speak Islamic."

"Arabic," Dundly added.

"Whatever, what's not English doesn't matter."

Conner injected some reasoning into that comment. "How can you say that when both you and Caroline here have business experience; you having found your own car company and her having been a CEO? You know that many people in this country are Latino and speak Spanish. You also conduct business internationally. So clearly you've made your money dealing with people who speak different languages."

"And your point?" Caroline jumped in seeming offended that Conner brought her into the mix.

"My point is, maybe we shouldn't be forcing the world to speak English. Maybe we should improve our education system so that we could speak their languages as well as our own to prove that we're not just all strength and muscles, but also that we have a bit of brain power too."

Ferguson cut in and explained, "But it is traditional that a person seeking to live in another country learn to speak the language. We're not asking for anything fancy."

Conner calmed down, thanking God that there's at least a semi-intelligent person on stage whom he can have a real debate with. "You are most certainly right Martin. All people seeking to remain in this country should learn English. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't learn other languages as well. Many nations have children learning two to three languages by high school. By the time they reach college they are usually fluent in three different languages. Why have we lagged so far behind in education that we can barely teach our kids to speak one language?"

Conner was hoping they would pick up the jab at the way Americans speak. It seemed the only vocabulary Americans knew was slang and curse words. None of them had ever picked up a dictionary let alone used one—and Urban Dictionary didn't count.

But of course they just glazed right over Conner's concern when Dundly raised his hand and signaled, "Let's move on. Mr. Knox, surprisingly, did raise an interesting point. He asked something along the lines of what will we do with Muslims who are legal U.S. citizens and are in good standing behavior? Will we force them out to a country they've probably never seen before? Ferguson, let's start with you."

The former attorney general opened his mouth and said one of the first stupid things Conner has ever heard him say. "Well in Islam there exists the Five Pillars of Faith. They are to them what the Ten Commandments are to Judaism and Christianity. One of the Five Pillars instructs Muslims to visit Mecca on a spiritual journey. Considering most Muslims are of middle-class status, they could afford this journey into Mecca, and thus many Muslims have at least visited their ancestral homeland. Therefore, even Muslims who happen to be U.S. citizens wouldn't feel that lost if we were to ship them back into the Middle East."

The zombie audience applauded his exposé on why it would be okay to send U.S. citizens to the Middle East. Clearly he and the audience must think that Mecca and the Kaaba is all just in the Middle East—that any nation in the Middle East can be Mecca. Or maybe they just think we can just ship the Muslims all into one location.

Conner shook his head stepping in. "And what about the Muslims who couldn't afford said spiritual journey? What do we do with them?"

Conner was waiting for this response; he saw it coming from a mile away, like a shore gently rising over the horizon as he steered his ship to port and readied himself to dock at a little bit of a history lecture.

Harry was the one who suggested it. "Well we just put them some place here where we can keep an eye on them."

"Yeah," Caroline agreed. "Like a small town where all the Muslims can live together away from the masses and practice their faith freely while the rest of us are safe. Does that satisfy you Conner? We have solved your 'unsolvable riddle.' We have provided both for the freedom and the safety of our citizens and even the Muslims."

Wow, she has already escalated to an "us vs. them" argument. Conner couldn't help but think, why am I running as a Republican again?

"What you two are proposing," Conner enlightened them, "has been proposed and conducted on numerous occasions in our history. Need I remind you of the Trail of Tears? There we shoved all the Native Americans into the absolute worst parts of the country; and if by chance the areas were nice, like what the Cherokee Nation had in Georgia, they were forced to leave and set up a town in another worse part of the nation. Let's fast forward to the Chinese Exclusion Act signed by President Arthur in 1882, where we barred a whole race of people from entering into our nation because they were, 'machine-like...of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron,' as one California senator put it. [10] And of course, who could forget the Japanese internment camps, where we forced loyal and respectable Japanese Americans into 'little towns' where they were degraded and treated like savages—all out of fear—out of paranoia. Are we to commit the same mistakes that our forefathers have committed?"

"It's not a mistake," Harry warned. "Sooner or later one of these Muslims will strap a bomb to their chests and blow us up. Best they do that in their own little towns."

The crowd cheered frantically, wanting Harry's vision of an America voided of Muslims. After the attacks in Chicago, these people were scared and would do anything that promised them that they wouldn't be targeted next—even if the proposals to keep them safe were crazy, evil, and unconstitutional.

Dundly transitioned. "Speaking of keeping an eye out on people, one man who has been keeping an eye out on his fellow Americans has become a traitor, releasing documents and procedures that exposed the NSA's routines. Mr. Knox, you are such an adamant voice for destroying the NSA aren't you? You must praise this man, Daniel Mason, as a demigod of some sort. Am I right?"

Clearly Dundly hates my guts. There's no other explanation why he would be taking repeated jabs at me. Maybe it was because Conner had bad-mouthed the Republican Party. Bad mouthing was allowed with regards to any topic in the Republican party, excluding the Republican Party itself, gun violence, and the defense budget. You talk bad about those three things, and you'll be an outcast.

But Conner held his head high, took a sip of water, and stood his ground. "I think what Daniel Mason did, in exposing the unconstitutional spying on Americans by the federal government, is nothing short of the big wakeup call we really needed. I haven't had enough time to review all of the documents, since they were just released only a few hours ago, but I do believe he was right in letting us know how far this government has trodden over our fourth amendment right to privacy. Ever since the signing of the Patriot Act in 2001, we have sacrificed valued privacy in exchange for the prospect of stopping terrorism. Furthermore, his exposure of the lack of communication, and quite possibly corruption, between the internal services of the CIA and FBI with the NSA, are quite alarming to say the least. After all, isn't all this spying supposed to prevent attacks like these? Clearly they aren't doing their jobs correctly, and from what I read in the reports, there is very little proper work going on—more like 'entertainment' for a bunch of federal employees."

Harry chopped the air with his hand as if to tear Conner's point to shreds. "Oh come on now, you don't buy any of that bullshit?" The crowd laughed and Conner knew the censor was going to have to be quick on that one. "He's clearly exaggerating and lying. This man is a traitor and should be arrested and tried for treason. Even Martin has to agree with me on that one."

Martin Ferguson nodded his head. "He did release secret governmental documents after signing a nondisclosure agreement before getting that position at the NSA. He breached the contract and should be punished accordingly."

Caroline brought the discussion back to safety. "And by doing this, Mason has exposed our practices to the enemies and has left us vulnerable to future attacks. And I want to point out Conner that you said if the NSA was doing their job correctly then the attacks on Chicago weren't supposed to occur. But how can they do their jobs correctly when people like you are calling for their heads to be cut off? You're a hypocrite."

While the crowd mixed in boos for Conner and cheers for Caroline, Conner was trying to keep himself under control as he organized his rebuttal. "If what the information Daniel Mason leaked is false, then why are you making a big stink about it? Clearly it has to be true in order to explain why you wish to arrest and punish the guy so much. And since I believe most, if not all the information, he released is true, I have to ask you this: If the CIA, FBI, and NSA knew about the attacks and still decided to let it happened, who is the enemy? The people who carried out the attacks, or the countrymen who allowed it to happen without stopping it?"

Conner felt that this question should've woken up everyone. Clearly there was some level of corruption or mismanagement occurring within the massive federal government that had way too much power. But instead of dwelling on the question before shouting out an answer, Harry Sayder simply overruled the question itself.

"Come on now is that even a question?" Harry exclaimed. "Of course it's the baddies who decided to blow themselves up. Had they not done it, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. Plus, I can't believe this man has duped you into believing the false crap he's feeding ya. You expect America to vote for a president who believes anything he's told?"

Conner slammed his fist on the podium in frustration. He couldn't hold his anger back any longer. However, he managed to respond to Harry's retort without yelling. "And you expect America to vote for an ignorant asshole like you who doesn't take anything he's told seriously because he thinks he's Albert Einstein reincarnated?"

His remark drew boos from the crowd. Conner was kicking himself after that one. They got under his skin, and in his momentary lack of judgment, they had reduced him, for a brief minute, into one of the zombies.

Footnote:

[10] He is referring to Senator John F. Miller of California, a proponent of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Americans in the second half of the 19th century saw Chinese immigrants as exotic, treacherous, and contenders for jobs and wages.