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Last Sunday at 5 a.m., Khalid Farouki, 31, rushed into his sons’ room, shook them awake and hurriedly snuck them out of the house to watch his neighborhood’s weekly airstrike show—a local tradition for the whole family to enjoy.
“I love that time of the week where you hear the excited screams of your neighbors and you know it’s time to run to the top of the cliff to watch the airstrike show together,” stated Mahmoud Farouki, 5, excitedly. “I love to watch the planes go fast and do tricks like flying upside down and dropping bombs on my kindergarten. It’s so cool!”
Sunday’s airstrike show featured aircrafts performing spectacular tricks including synchronized fly-ins, 360-degree flips and hospital bombings. Spectators, including Khalid and his family, gasped with joy and applauded as planes dropped kerosene and lit entire fields aflame with a spectacular red blaze. As he watched the house his family had inhabited for five generations become incinerated in a 30-foot column of light, Khalid cheered wildly and affirmed that attending this type of show is essential for family bonding time.
“It’s really important to take your sons to these kinds of events, if only so that they know you care about them,” he stated, standing and cheering as a plane flew overhead and sprayed bullets ten feet from where his family was positioned. “If I didn’t take them out every Sunday morning, they might think I didn’t care, they might think that I was an inattentive dad or they might be incinerated in a 600°C mushroom cloud. I want them to think back fondly to this time in their lives, because I couldn’t think of anything more fun to do on a Sunday morning!”
“It’s great for families, yes, but this generation knows nothing about what a real airstrike show is,” stated Falastin Farouki, Khalid’s father, as he waved his sweating, smiling face with a free airstrike show fan or debris. “Pilots really used to put on a show back in the day; they really cared about their audience. They cared about their audience so much that sometimes, if they had probable cause to believe a terrorist was not in the crowd, they wouldn’t incinerate their audience. Don’t get me wrong—these new unmanned airstrike shows are fantastic—but you always know the outcome. There’s never any surprise, or sense of wonder for the kids.”
Khalid, interrupting his father, gathered the family together to take a family photograph in front of several exploding mines that had just been triggered.
“Without these airstrike shows, I would not see my neighbors, or my old friends,” affirmed Khalid, relaxing his face after taking one last “silly” photo. “It can be so easy for us to find little excuses to stay inside. Like, oh, there is a gunman outside our door. Or, oh, there are two gunmen in a tank outside our door. But these airstrike shows really make us want to go outside and have fun.”
However, when he was informed that due to new legislature, there existed the possibility that the airstrike shows may be cancelled, Khalid regained seriousness.
“I 100-percent oppose cutting funding for these amazing, enriching shows,” he stated as 10-foot tall hunks of debris fell from the sky and tunneled into the ground behind him. “They always give the members of my community and I something to talk about, and I dream that someday my children too will be able to take their sons to airstrike shows, and show them just how much they care.”
