...And We're Not Going to Take It Anymore

            The people were fed up.  They had noticed the ever-so-subtle changes in the country and it made them squirmy.  They saw their golden Utopia slipping further and further away from them.  They saw the future, and they weren’t going to take it anymore.

            First it was subtle:  Velcro replacing the shoelace on the occasional tennis shoe brand.  OK, whatever.  The kids like it and it’s novel.  Then they saw Velcro slowly begin to replace plastic buttons on baseball caps, which elicited a growing sense of wary suspicion.  That was when fashion designer Werner Johnansen Garcia came out with his “Fall line”.  Velcro had replaced the buttons on this year’s line of marginally-different-from-last-year’s-rehashed-they-really-think-women-are-this-stupid blouses.  And it caught on.  The PTA lamented it.  Strippers loved it.  And teenaged American girls proved yet again that they have no sales resistance.  Sure, a few discerning fashion writers saw it as the trick it was, but the idea was already planted in the minds of Middle America.  Velcro is the new button.

            Soon the cable news shouters noticed.  Asylum inmate of the month turned political anchor, Greg O’Dooley, took up the button cause with a vengeance.

            “Wake up, people.  It’s everywhere.  At first it was just a Velcro hat here or a tennis shoe there, but now it’s in the schools.  Your kids are going to school with Velcro.  I just read that Kansas City school district reports that young girls have created a system that tells boys what sexual practices they’re willing to perform by how many Velcro straps they have on their pants.  It makes me sick.  Our founding fathers didn’t need Velcro.  They fought a revolution, against Belgium or somebody, so that they could wear their buttons.  Think about it.  Can you see colonial wives sewing Velcro onto their husbands’ pantaloons?  Their pants wouldn’t have stayed up and we would’ve lost the revolution.  We’d all be speaking Belgianese.  I know.  I know.  But, this is America people.  Take to the streets and let your leaders know that we don’t want government funded Velcro clothes.  We want freedom.  (dramatic pause) We want buttons.”           

            Soon the reverberations could be felt from Alaska to Maine.  People accepted O’Looney’s clarion call and took to the streets, proudly wearing their buttons in politically incorrect defiance of current trends.  Sure, the slogans didn’t have as much oomph as those of other movements in the past.

“Hey, hey, government guys, how many Velcro straps have you put on our pants, today?”

“No interlocking connective straps without representation!”

“1-2-3-4, let us keep our buttons and stop putting Velcro on our damn clothes you worthless socialist power mongers.”

“Hitler would’ve worn Velcro, if he’d, you know, been alive when they invented it.”

             And those were only the ones that kind of made sense.   

             Ah, the early days of the buttonites were glorious.  They banded together, grassroots-style.  They circulated petitions.  They successfully got Velcro banned from the state of Texas, but that was only after a compromise (first Texas threatened to secede from the Union and, after realizing that nobody cared, they threatened to take Willie Nelson with them, so a compromise was reached).  Texas governor, Arnold Hamilton III, flushed with victory, lent voice to the country’s concerns:

            “Look, I don’t hate Velcro.  If they want to wear it in San Francisco, that’s fine.    We just don’t like it down here.  The federal government wants to put a hurtin on the giant belt buckle industry, because they’re clearly in the pockets of the Velcro industry.”

            And thus a movement was born.