Bench Warfare: Satanic Panic on the Rail Trail

A favorite place for a walk is the Hudson Valley Rail Trail. There’s at least one stretch north of Hopewell Junction that is regularly infested with religious messages of fear, doom and  gloom. Eternal damnation is predicted for us all.

The trail starts at the old railway depot at Hopewell Junction and connects with the Walkway Across the Hudson in Poughkeepsie.

There are donated benches along the way – some promote a business but most are personal memorials.

A designated Veteran’s Memorial Mile is marked on both ends by a tidy, carefully tended, patch of flowers and flags. 

Some memorial benches are decorated with plantings, bird houses and one even has a some forks and spoons as if to help the departed eat in the afterlife.

One bench was bookended with conifers last month and now it has a hanging lantern on one side. 

On another, there’s a a lucite angel on a silvery chain.

And these benches are also where some determined soul deposits little packages of poison, dollops of doom – each carefully placed inside a plastic baggy and held down by a rock.

Checking them out on line I know I don’t have a full set of these lurid little cartoon booklets but I have enough to see that pretty much all of us are destined to the fires of eternal damnation. Atheists and homosexuals of course. But also 7th day Adventists, Jews, Masons, Mormons, Muslims and most especially Roman Catholics. The Caesars of Rome were apparently replaced by a den of religious vipers and the mother of harlots – the Vatican – has three deadly daughters: Islam, Communism and Nazism. Well – that’s good to know.

Life, it seems, is a deadly and titanic struggle between the one good thing and absolute satanic evil and most of us are doomed to hellfire and utter and eternal damnation.

So – I do my best to keep the rail trail a hate free zone: I make a point of picking them up much as I would jagged glass on the beach or a responsible pet owner picking up after a dog.

The good thing is that each comes in a very handy baggy – perfect for storing those little items that you really want to collect on a walk.

There’s a variety of twitter accounts called “Emergency Kittens” designed to help out whenever you find yourself distressed by bad news or angry at the daily dollops of doom.

This picture was not posed by that account but by Connie Ruzich @wherrypilgrim for #InternationalMilitaryHistoryCatDay. More military cats at her blog post: A Marching Cat https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-marching-cat.html

And here are some of those satanic panic packets of poison.