Oh Satan, you silly goose!

I would like to discuss with you a person of interest that most of us in society today find to be generally very unpleasant; Satan. Satan is considered a menace largely because he is one of the most annoying people anyone has ever encountered. Now, I make it a general rule of thumb to try not to gossip about other people in an effort to avoid hurting their feelings, but Satan doesn't count. We can gossip about Satan all day long if we want to, and never be brought to judgement for it. In fact, we are encouraged to warn people about Satan and even treat him very badly by making him leave the premises- and we're praised for doing so! Satan is the one person that we are supposed to be rude to, a concept rather hard to grasp by many, many people across the globe.
Satan is like the kid in the neighborhood that picks his nose and smells like tomato soup. Nobody really wants to be around him and you could say that right to his face but it never seems to sink in. He never gets the hint. He keeps showing up largely uninvited and wants to hang out. Parents really don't like their kids to hang out with Satan because they usually consider him to be a bad influence. Whenever kids are with him, they tend to get into trouble, and kids are the one's who usually have the hardest time being rude to Satan. Think about it this way: we drill it into our kids heads that they have to be kind to everyone and yet they are supposed to ignore Satan, order him leave, and never ever invite him to any party! We would ground our children if they ever treated another person the way we are telling them to treat Satan. No wonder they're confused! This must be the reason so many of our young people are on drugs, fornicating and staying out past curfew. They don't want to hurt Satan's feelings! Imagine the following scenario: A teenage girl comes home at 2 a.m. and explains to her furious mother that while at her best friends house, another group of friends came over and picked them up to go visit even more friends, and while with this group of friends who were visiting friends, other friends called and wanted them to come over. So the teenager gets into a car with her best friend and their other friends and their friends and while en route to visit the latest group of friends, the best friends dad calls and tells his daughter that she has to go home, so the friend that is driving has to turn the car around and go drop off the best friend. Then, as soon as they are back on the road and almost to their original destination, the friend who was driving suddenly noticed the time and since they were almost to the latest friends house, the friend with the car decided to drop all the other friends off and just leave them there in order to get herself home on time. (Just as a side note, this is exactly the type of explanation I get from one of my own teenage daughters when she is out past her curfew.) The teenager continues to explain how they had waited and waited for the parents of one of the friends to show up and give each of them a ride home but as it turned out, they never showed up because those parents had left town the day before and weren't due back until three days later. Finally, the teenage girl's mother speaks up and asks a series of important questions beginning with "Why didn't you call me?"
"Because nobody had a phone except Satan, and he wouldn't let me use his." The girl replies
"Satan!? You were with Satan??" exclaims the mother in horror and disbelief, "How many times have I told you that you are never to go anywhere with Satan!" The girl realizes her mistake and immediately tries to defend him, "What has Satan ever done to you? Geeze mom, your sooo judgemental!"
"Every time you are with him, you do something stupid!" The mother scolds,
"Like what?" demands the girl,
"Like getting into a car after midnight with a group of kids that I've never met and staying out until two in the morning without so much as a phone call!"
" I told you that nobody had a phone!"
"Satan had a phone, but he wouldn't let you use it!!"
"He didn't want anyone to use up all his minutes!"
"He is not the kind of guy I want you hanging around with!"
"Because of that?"
"Because he's fowl mouthed, bad tempered and violent! And besides, Terlene Harris told me that he talked Alice Henry into fornicating with that Freddy Gibson and Freddy got her pregnant!"
''Freddy almost got her pregnant." The teenager corrects,
"How do you almost get someone pregnant? There is no such thing as almost being pregnant, you either are or you aren't! They don't have a pregnancy test with a window for a 'yes', a ' no' or an 'almost' !"
"So what am I supposed to do, hurt Satan's feelings? You may be able to do that but I can't!"
"Oh for Pete's sake, it's Satan! He doesn't have feelings!"
The irony of this is that we mother's really aren't sure of whether or not Satan has feelings. In fact, for most of us who have a natural tendency toward nurturing, we may have actually worried about Satan's feelings, cared about them and had no desire to cause him more misery than he already has. Take Helen Marshall for example; Satan always shows up at Helen's house about the same time every month, like clock work. She could just be doing the dishes and minding her business when Satan comes over and begins pointing out all the work Helen does around the house with barely a word of thanks from her family. Helen begins to see some truth in this and is suddenly seized with an overpowering urge to go find her husband and kick him for what he will assume is no apparent reason. Instead of just getting a backbone and demanding Satan leave her and her family alone, she only blushes at Satan's suggestions and responds shyly with "Oh Satan, you silly goose, why would I want to hurt my sweet husband?" Later we discover that it's women like Helen who end up not only kicking but killing they're poor husbands when something as basic as a midol would have done the trick without a prison sentence attached.
I suppose this is one of the many reasons that no one really likes Satan. He has been involved in more scandals and life sentences than anyone could count, he defrauds and con's people, disrupts relationships and encourages my husband to pass gas in the car on the freeway in a snowstorm, thereby ensuring there will be no escape for those of us who have had the misfortune of being born with a nose. Does Satan get a bad rap? No, but it's the little things he does that bother us the most. When you lose your car key's, you can bet Satan had something to do with it. When you trip on the sidewalk in front of someone you want to impress, it's Satan. When you have finally saved up enough money to retire and then find out you need a triple bypass, Satan! The only good news about Satan is that when we are really backed into a corner, Satan serves as a perfectly acceptable scapegoat. And he doesn't smell like tomato soup.