DO NOT allow strangers into the house unless your employer specifically informs you that they want you and their children to be brutally murdered.

DO NOT tell a caller that you are the babysitter alone with children. Mentioning children can often be a turnoff for potential suitors. Focus instead on your articles of clothing, mentioning how they feel on your sensitive, downy young skin.

DO bring items to entertain the children with, like coloring books, colored paper, color markers, tape, board games, puppets, pens, old newspapers, tacks, dirt, aerosol-spray cans, mail, Tabasco sauce, malt liquor, gasoline, bleach, currants, fast-food wrappers, and anything else you can grab ahold of. Lay these items in a pile in the center of the room and watch as the imagination of children takes hold. Feel free to use this time to rifle through their parents’ dresser drawers, or to masturbate vigorously in the bathroom, knowing someone could burst in at any time, thus adding to the level of danger.

DO NOT go outside to investigate suspicious noises or activities. Any suspicious noise should immediately be responded to with as much buckshot as you can fire through the front doorway, followed by a confident, “How you friggin’ like me now, Osama?”

DO keep matches locked away from children. Be sure to let them know that you are doing this only because matches have magical properties that give their user the power to cast any object aflame, like a wizard.

DO NOT leave a child alone in a bathtub, unless the call is very very important, like from your boyfriend.

DO NOT allow the children under your care to place garbage bags over their heads, unless you have poked a hole in the top of the bag and you are certain you will be back from your friend’s place in under ten minutes.

DO keep portable heaters away from play areas, curtains and furniture. Keep portable heaters close to the children at all times, so that you can be assured they are always warm and toasty.

DO NOT allow children to hide in the refrigerator for any reason. Pick one child at random and place them in the refrigerator for at least 40 minutes, to illustrate the dangers inherent in this activity.

DO show children how to stop, drop and roll in case their clothes catch on fire. Remind them that their sudden combustion is a very real possibility, and should be feared at all times. Add that it often happens as a child is falling asleep.

So.

Let’s kill the homeless.

And please — don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to throw around a line like “we should kill the homeless” loosely. No, I wouldn’t suggest for a second that we should “kill the homeless” as some kind of trite, tongue-in-cheek Swiftian homage. You, the reader, are above that. I’m above that. Even if you’re not above that — well, I am.

So, no — I don’t say “we should kill the homeless” satirically, but rather as a means to say that we should quite seriously eradicate them off the face of the earth, leaving nothing but silence and a thin, cartoonish wisp of smoke.

Not kill them to eat them. Not kill them as part of some grand, despotic, sociological design. Not kill them for entertainment purposes, even though it would be funny. No. Kill them simply so they’d be dead and never come back.

Now, before you jump all over me for this, please allow me the opportunity to explain. I think you’ll find my rationale sound, my reasoning as unblemished as buffed porcelain. First and foremost among my reasons, I should state clearly, is that I like my change. I enjoy change. I find it useful — for buying things and whatnot. Owning no washer/dryer combo, I find I’m constantly in need of it to wash my shirts and pants.

Following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we should kill the homeless. When faced with the embarrassment and aggravation I would most certainly suffer in denying the homeless my laundry change when they ask for it, I propose that just getting rid of them altogether would make a lot more sense. Were they utterly dead, I could walk down a street without having to listen to them shriek like crazy people when I try to soberly explain that I can’t give them money to eat because I need to wash pants.

Bringing us to the second point: all that shrieking. Man. They shriek a lot, loudly, often about Jesus, and make no sense at all. One might begin to suspect, in fact, that they’re crazy — to which I put forward that this might very well be the case.

After all, they do live on streets. Chew on that for a minute, because it’s pretty odd when you think about it. Streets are for walking and driving, not for sitting and shrieking. If you and I were walking down the street, for instance, going to, let’s say, a bookstore, though really we could be doing pretty much anything — I’m fairly easygoing, and if you had some errands or something to maybe run and you just wanted some company, I’d be up for that — but in any case, we’re walking, and suddenly I say “Excuse me” or something, sit down on the street, and start shrieking about Jesus.

“Whoa,” you might think. “This guy’s crazy.” Maybe you’re even rethinking the whole day, piecing together an excuse in your head to do your errands alone. And the whole time I’m breaking your concentration by yelling at the high threshold of human hearing that Jesus is the Savior of all mankind, and what do you mean you have to do laundry, give me money.

I’d bet safe money you’d think I was at the very least odd. Moreover, you’d be right. Well then, let me lay this on you — homeless people do that kind of thing all the time. They don’t even have errands. Or if they do, then all that yelling and begging probably is the errand.

This callous and wanton disregard for the mores of society would, I can safely assure you, stop very very suddenly if we were to really roll up our sleeves and kill all of them. Dead men tell no tales, after all. More to the point, they don’t shriek when you prop them up on street corners and put change cups in their stiff fingers. They’re actually soothingly quiet and unobtrusive. Like a waft of summer air off the ocean. Except dead, and with a tin cup.

Thirdly: homeless people are probably evil. One only has to use a modicum of common sense to figure out that anyone sitting and shrieking on streets when they should be mowing their lawns and watching real-life castaway shows is no doubt a shifty and suspicious villain of mystery. While everyone else sleeps honestly in their store-bought beds, foul-smelling men are stalking our good streets and maliciously sitting on them.

Sitting for good? No. Sitting for change. Sitting the decency out of America. I once saw a homeless guy crap in a mailbox, you know. Tell me that’s not evil.

“Well,” you’re probably thinking, “why doesn’t someone just kill the homeless.” And that’s fantastic, because I was thinking the exact same thing.

Fourthly: perhaps I didn’t actually see a homeless guy crap in a mailbox. But that’s beside the point, because you know anyone willing to rob an innocent victim (me) of clean laundry (mine) is capable of absolutely anything. Murdering the President, even. I mean, they don’t have guns, true, but I don’t think this an adequate yardstick for measuring character. Homeless people can’t afford guns. Think for a moment, though — what if you could buy guns with change? Then every homeless person would have a gun. No laundry would ever get done. Society would topple, not from the anarchy, but from the stench. It would just sort of keel over. Now, call me wrong, but I find that kind of idea pretty depraved.

The solution? You guessed it, friend. Kill them all.

Finally: as if all of that shrieking and sitting and government official slaughter weren’t enough grounds for a prompt and expedient countrywide eradication of the homeless, they’re also all very ugly. The homeless have passed far from what society would deem conventionally unattractive and landed miles further into a dark carnival of Streisandesque deformity. Yes, your bleeding hearts will moan about their human rights, but I think they’re missing an important point, which is that the homeless are profoundly unsexy.

Coming at the situation from a purely sex-based perspective, the homeless are so useless it’s obscene. Besides, even if you wanted to make love to the homeless — and might I add that I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario in which this would sound enticing — you’d have to do it in the middle of the street while they pounded on your back and yelled about the Savior of the universe. I propose that this scenario would entice only the most daring enthusiasts. For every other John and Jane Doe out there, though, the homeless are about as useless as sand.

In summation: we have everything to gain by killing the homeless. And even if this ends up not being true, and in fact we gain nothing from it, at least we don’t lose much. It’s not like they were saving our seats in the theater or anything. If they were doing that, there might be a few stragglers to my proposal. As it stands, however, we seem to be in the clear. The only problem I can see is the irrational outrage of a small faction of whiny crybabies.

Bringing me to my addendum: we should probably kill said crybabies before we kill the homeless, so they won’t give us all headaches when we shoot every homeless person in the back. After that, we should probably also kill all the people the homeless people used to hang out with, so they won’t be bringing us down at otherwise-fun parties. And after that, we should probably stop killing people altogether, leaving merely the threat of killing more people if any sass about the homeless killing was forthcoming. But probably no more killing, because at this point we’d have an awful lot of bodies lying around everywhere, so everything would stink pretty bad for a while. I’d guess we’d have to institute at least a six-month grace period before we killed any more people, at which point further suggestions could be submitted for my approval.

Clearly my reasoning is flawless, my methods precise. Grab your weapon of choice, my brothers and sisters, and let’s go kill the homeless! But wait — the crybabies first! Then the homeless! Then the people who hung out with them! Then rounding it all off with follow-up reprimands of death to anyone giving us sass! Then a six-month no-kill grace period! Then a write-in suggestion campaign for further killings!

To the streets!