What I Would Do If I Were In The Purge


USA

The Purge is a hugely popular film series that has now spawned a USA Network/SyFy television series. The premise of all of these is pretty simple: In a world not entirely unlike the world we live in today, a law has been passed that makes all crime legal for one 12-hour period on one day every year, an event called, fittingly enough, the Purge. And if you’re anything thing like me, you’ve spent a lot of time since the first Purge movie was released thinking about what you would if you lived in a world where the Purge was real, even if you’ve never actually seen any of the movies and have the TV show sitting unwatched on your DVR, which I have not and do. What I’m saying is that I have a lot of half-formed and uninformed thoughts about the Purge. Here’s what I’ve figured out.

If I were in the Purge, I think, instead of murdering people or rioting, I would spend the other 364 days building an impenetrable bunker with one of those eye scanner locks and then stay down there all day doing cybercrimes against hedge funds. That way I would be safe from other Purgers while I make millions in money stolen from people who already have too much of it. Bingo bango, the perfect plan. The only problem is that I would need to learn how to build an impenetrable bunker and do cybercrimes because I do not know how to do either of those things.

Maybe I can just hire people to build my impenetrable bunker and teach me to do cybercrimes. I’ll just have to pay them with a percentage of my future Purge earnings. But I guess, before I went down into my bunker on Purge Day, I would have to track down the people who helped me and be like “Hey, we’re cool, right? You’re not going to use your knowledge of my secret bunker and cybercrime fortune to rob me, possibly after killing me and holding my decapitated head in front of the eye scanner to get into the facility, are you?”

Hmm. As I’m typing this I’m starting to realize I would definitely get murdered on Purge Day by someone who knows about my bunker and they’ll use my decapitated head to get past the eye scanner. So that won’t work. Let’s try something else.

If I were in the Purge, maybe I would stick to something smaller, like spending solid two or three hours doing donuts in the meticulously manicured front lawns of my enemies’ homes. That would be fun. And maybe I would keep a notepad with “Places/People to Purge” written on the front with me at all times the other 364 days of the year and I would make a big show out of adding new items to it. Like if I went to the Apple Store and they told me they couldn’t give me an appointment until the following Tuesday or something, I’d pull out my notepad in grand dramatic fashion, flip through the pages until I find an empty line, touch the tip of my pen to my tongue like old-timey reporters do in movies, and then quietly — but definitely audibly — mutter “Well it looks like you just made the Purge list” as I jot down “The Apple Store.”

But, if I’m being honest here, I would probably talk about the Purge all year long — what and who I’m Purging, how I’m gonna do it, all the donuts I’m gonna do — but then on Purge Day I’d just sit around the house looking at social media all and saying things like “Damn, the Purge is wild this year” to myself.

And even if I do leave the house for the Purge, I would probably be the guy who waits until the last minute to get supplies and then shows up at the riots on Purge Day holding like a Swiffer and wearing an empty sunflower seed bucket on my head as a helmet because that was all they had left at Target the night before. Everyone in my riot group would get so sick of my crap. They’d be all “Really, Brian? A Swiffer and a sunflower seed bucket? We talked about this last year…” and I’d look down at my shoes in shame and be like “I know.”

I would surely be murdered by my own riot group. If one of my neighbors doesn’t get to me first for the donuts.

Maybe, if I were in the Purge, I would book a reservation at a nice-ish restaurant — nice enough that I’d wanna eat there, not so nice that the rioters will try to occupy it in a class-based revolutionary act — and then when the bill comes I would slide it back toward the waiter and say, “Oh ho ho, my good man” and then exit without paying.

But I guess, if I also stiff the waiter on the tip, he might watch me slide the check back toward him and then grab a steak knife and slice me wide open like an avocado. It would send a message to other customers, too. A win-win for him. A pretty solid lose-lose for me, though.

In fact, the more I think about it, if I were in the Purge, I would almost certainly die. Even if I don’t die in one of the ways I already mentioned, or at the hand of a nemesis I don’t even know about (IS IT YOU, DEAR READER? ARE YOU MY NEMESIS?), I would probably be the idiot who gets killed by a falling piano on the way to the riots, like a cartoon character.

Oh man, the Internet would roast my cashews the whole next day if I got killed by a falling piano during the Purge. Everyone would be so desensitized to death that mine would become light comic post-Purge fodder. There would be headlines like “This Poor Schmuck Went Out to Purge and Got Killed By a Falling Piano Like a Damn Looney Tune” and everybody on Twitter would quote-tweet them and add “lol” or screencap it and post it as a picture next to a screencap of like Pete Campbell saying “Not great, Bob!” or some weirdly relevant tweet by Dril. Someone would find video and set it to the Looney Tunes theme song and add Porky Pig stuttering his “That’s all, folks!” sign-off. I would be a meme.

And then someone would find the guy who dropped the piano on me and interview him and he’d probably be like “To be honest, I was going to steal the piano, that was my original Purge Day plan. But then I saw him on the sidewalk holding a Swiffer and wearing a damn bucket on his head and was like ‘You know, I’ve seen cartoon characters get hit by falling pianos but I’ve never actually seen it happen to a person.’ And I mean, he just looked like such a doofus and there were other pianos I could grab instead and, like, it was the Purge and all, so…” And then he would mimic pushing a piano out of the window of a fourth-story window and he and the reporter would both chuckle again at the thought of it.

If I were in the Purge, I would be a national laughingstock for years to come.

I would not like being in the Purge.

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