Today, the 10th of October, is 'Metric Day.' It makes a sick sort of sense if you think about it, that the 10th day of the 10th month of the year would be singled out for worship by a mass of troglodytes who writhe and gyrate at the altar of the number 10.
That's right, our inalienable right to a system of measurements based upon (among other things) kernels of wheat, a medieval English king's foot and the plowing prowess of oxen is under attack by a cabal of secular humanists, Zoroastrians and Freemasons. These shadowy elites will not be not be satisfied until they have eliminated all vestiges of our sacred and natural system of measurements from the public sphere. They have already begun to make themselves known.
Sure, it may have seemed a bit peculiar when the nice young woman handed you a small card with an English-to-metric conversion table on it and you may have politely refused the old man who was trying to hand out Bibles and meter sticks. You may even have been offended when you saw the preacher on Library Mall crying out against the perceived 'evils' of abortion, homosexuality and why we are all going to hell for using the pound instead of the kilogram.
But it's worse than you thought. Did you know they are teaching children metric units in our public schools? That's right, state-sponsored metricism. Apparently each morning after the now mandatory 'Pledge of Allegiance,' there is a 'Moment of Reflection' where students chant 'meter...gram...liter...newton...' and so on. While participation is optional, it is still an improper use of valuable class time.
If this were the only intrusion of metric ideology into places where it does not belong, it might be forgivable. Unfortunately, there are many more. There has been a strident movement to post 'conversion tablets' (two stone tablets, each bearing five simple conversion rules) in courthouses across the country. People see crime, poverty and drugs, and point to the English system of weights and measures as the primary culprit. They hope that by exposing delinquents to the metric system they can restore a sense of civility and reinforce good behavior. As one supporter of a pro-tablet law stated, 'This country was founded on metric principles, our founding fathers were all metric men at heart and I think it's about time we got back to our roots.'
There is nothing at all wrong with the use of the metric system in private homes, schools and gathering places. The metric system has been the inspiration for some of the most sublime art, writing and philosophy in human history. I have listened to a few of the new 'metric rock' bands, and some of them are pretty good. We have come to a point, however, where we as a society must decide if we want to let the metric system undermine and destroy our carefully crafted metric/state barriers.
We all know what the right answer is. After all, what sounds better? 'Lothar drank .23848 cubic meters of mead' or 'Lothar drank a hogshead of mead'? Yeah, that's what I thought. When you say 'hogshead,' you know that sometime, somewhere, somebody found a hog and killed it for the sole purpose of using its head as a drinking vessel.
This displays a sort of hulking machismo that is all too often lacking in systems of measurement, a hulking machismo that we need to preserve at all costs. And so, my fellow citizens, I ask you, on this most metric of days, to stick to the English system and don't budge an inch.
