Into the Valley of Death Rode the Five Hundred

One of the main benefits of The Program is that it teaches us how to manage our relationships better. In some respects this isn't that complicated a task because we're so self-centered and have behaved so badly that it's not hard to make a few changes. There's a lot to fix. We don't have to dig too deeply to find flaws. It's like we have ten rifles and one machine gun and we're blasting away at anyone who comes into our path -- we don't think, we just shoot -- and The Program takes away the machine gun. That's the good news. The machine gun has been doing a lot of damage.


But, of course, there's some bad news. Isn't there usually some bad news? Doesn't it usually involve hard work? God, I hate hard work. Anyway, we're so impressed that we're not killing people at a fearsome clip that we think we don't have to do anything else. Our sponsor points out that we may have to do something about the remaining rifles. We start taking them down, one by one. Some of them aren't too hard to give up. Some of them are hard to give up. And most of us keep a secret stash of rifles and the odd rocket propelled grenade launcher in our secret arms cache. Just in case.


I'm not adverse to firing up the machine gun from time to time.