We as Americans take so very much for granted: Those who consume alcohol take for granted that the local supermarket or Stop-n-Rob will have that daily 12-pack of Labatt’s Blue readily available when they finish a long hard shift of shovel-leaning while the “new guy” digs the hole to repair the sewer that is plugged along the busy highway. There would never come a day when that beer wouldn’t be chilled and waiting to be purchased with rumpled, wadded greenbacks- right?

Indeed, Americans take for granted such staples as their Androids, iPhones, Escalades, CSI, Monday Night Football, internet, pornography, cocaine, and paid days off. Despite an economy on the verge of collapse as Dollar Bill clutches his chest in cardiac arrest, it seems that we Americans cannot envision a loss of the economic and personal freedom that we have enjoyed since the founding of this nation; save for the years of the Great Depression. Most certainly, joblessness is high in 2011 and money is tight, but was long as we have our unions, pensions, and unemployment insurance, we’ll be A-Okay – wouldn’t you say? As long as the Middle East doesn’t break out in any manner of major military conflict, we’ll still be able to buy gas and get the kids to soccer practice, drama club, and Taekwondo – so as to live vicariously through them – won’t we?

What would we do if the feces made direct impact with the air-cooling device? What if rapidly-occurring world events shook the very foundations of our pretty American delusions and brought metaphorical Steinway pianos falling down on us from the sky? Very well, to put aside all literary pretentiousness and wordplay – what if the poop really hit the fan? What if everything we take for granted was destroyed like a maladjusted six year old would build a red, white, and blue Lego palace and then demolish it in a fit of rage? What would we do in our broken castle?

In The Wayfarers fictional sense, there is one or more who may be able to shed some light and although it is mere fiction it may encourage us to heed to that inborn, God-given sense of survival and “fight or flight.” It may uplift us and encourage us to focus past the temporal and instead on what is real and eternal…

…because there will come a day – perhaps sooner than we are prepared for – when the fan will turn brown.