WWJD Put it back

For the last few weeks on my way to work I've been passing a "support our troops" ribbon lying in the road.

For those not familiar with contemporary united states vehicular adornments, a "support our troops" ribbon is somewhat akin to a fridge magnet. It is usually made up to resemble a "yellow ribbon" (or sometimes a "red white and blue ribbon") and stuck to the back of a car (like this). I think the idea is to emphasize that the driver of the vehicle truly believes that people who are paid to be in the army are fundamentally better people than anyone else in the world. In order to make this they buy these magnets which are mass produced in Korea or Taiwan or somewhere similar.

Anyway, there was this fading magnet lying in the road, and on friday I stopped to pick it up. I'm thinking of making a collection of these faded and fallen emblems, I already have a couple on my fridge.

As I picked it up and turned it over, I noticed that it had tape on the back, and someone had written "WWJD Put it back". This confused me for a while, not least because it took me some thinking to figure out what WWJD stands for.

[It's "What would Jesus do?"]

I paused for a moment. Did someone really want me to leave this lying in the road where most people wouldn't notice it (it'd been sitting there for at least a fortnight, probably longer)?

Eventually, I reconstructed a story. Someone felt very strongly about their "support our troops" ribbon. But they had lost ribbons in the past. So, on replacing a ribbon, they put this message to the person they imagined was stealing the ribbon of the back of their car, implying that Jesus, were he suddenly reincarnated on earth 2000 years after his death and who, after assimilating all the changes that had gone on since he was last on earth, decided that it would be a jolly jape to steal "support our troops" ribbons from the back of people's parked cars, would, on sober reflection, decide that such petty theft was not becoming of the second coming of the son of God, and would lovingly reaffix it to the vehicle.

That's quite a lot to swallow, and I'm not sure that I particularly care for this depiction of the messiah as one prone to juvenile ribbon stealing pranks, even if he is beset by pangs of guilt and puts it back straight away. And if he did come back in 2005, I think he would have other things on his mind such as the last battle with Satan, the rise of the antichrist, and all that other weird shit from Revelations that my Religious Studies teacher used to swear blind was the absolute literal truth.

But anyway, the discovery of the ribbon lying on the road with its cryptic message leads to a other conclusions. The owner of this ribbon who wrote the "WWJD put it back" with a felt-tip pen is now most likely under the impression that their solemn invocation of their one true god Himselves to protect this car magnet has been ignored by some godless tyke, who has again taken away this most precious of emblems. It makes you wonder if the first magnet which we must suppose existed but was also remove (hence, the need for the WWJD message) may actually have succumbed to the same fate as this one --- that is, no one ever stole a ribbon from this good Christians car, but the first ribbon also fell off in the street. The magnets on these ribbons aren't very strong. So this unfortunate god fearing individual is now tortured by thoughts of lawless individuals half-inching "support our troops" ribbon magnets when in fact no such people exist, they just fell off. That's rather sad.

One final irony is that because the magnet is so weak, the fact that the author of the WWJD message needed to stick tape to the back of the ribbon in order to write on it meant that there was extra distance between the magnet and the car, and this most likely weakened the strength of attraction between the two, and hastened the demise of the ribbom. I also find that rather sad.

I like to think that, when the next book of the bible is finally released (and I know people complaing about JK Rowling, but this really is taking the mickey...) some version of this story can be included as a parable. "The parable of the car driving, troop supporting Christian, and thief that didn't exist". Something like that, anyway.

Pictures should follow in successive posts.