Hordes of middle-aged white men have been spotted in recent weeks on the outskirts of cities beneath or bordering the Mason Dixon Line, wandering deliriously in circles outside of what is usually a Chevy Suburban of some sort. The wanderers share similar taste in clothes, for the most part: New Balance trainers underneath stiff Levi jorts, pastel-colored polos, crew socks paired with Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and every item of clothing is decorated with an exorbitant number of velcro pockets.

Witnesses were amused at first but have grown increasingly anxious as this rare phenomenon appears to be erupting rapidly on the outskirts of cities that have recently lost historical statues. Wanderers have also recently displayed more aggressive behavior to strangers passing by.

“I have had to quickly cross the street with my children on numerous occasions,” a single mom told reporters near the border of Albany, New York, where a statue honoring the Confederate slave owner, Major Gen. Philip Schuyler, was removed. “I’m so creeped out!” another bystander said to local reporters. “They almost look ghostly with their heads twitching left and right like that – like they are searching for something they’ve lost forever.”

Three residents in Georgia allegedly saw one of these suburban drifters attack an innocent passerby without a mask on, screaming in his face, “WHERE AM I?!”

A police report said a boomer outside of Louisville had repeatedly grabbed an elderly woman by the collar of her shirt and jolted her back and forth, begging for directions to a Trader Joe’s. The elderly woman was traumatized, but had no injuries after the incident. When questioned what on earth these wanderers are doing, each baby boomer had an eerily similar tale.

Todd, a 51-year old financial analyst, was escorted back to his home in Charleston, South Carolina when, after circling three times around the column where the John C. Calhoun monument once stood, made the wrong turn and just kept driving.

For the last five years, Todd had relied on the directional confidence that pulsed from underneath John C. Calhoun’s hardened cloak, and the mysterious scroll he clutched as he looked out over all of Calhoun Street, also memorializing one the South’s most prominent defenders of slavery. Todd dreamt the scroll was a map of all of South Carolina.

“I always knew where to turn at Calhoun,” Todd cried out while nervously adjusting his croakies. “I loved him!” he squeaked.

When asked if he knew who John C. Calhoun was, Todd got defensive.  “Listen, all history matters, all statues matter, all lives matter, not just some.” Todd cleared his throat after he spoke.

Doctor Quinn Flores, one of the top psychiatrists in the country, was asked to comment on the large swaths of men wandering outside of their respective suburbs, skittishly pacing back and forth, and sometimes harassing people. Flores told reporters, “I have never in all my 30 years of psychiatry experience seen what we are dealing with now.” Flores had constructed a national task force of therapists, behavioral specialists, researchers, and psychologists to study the outbreak.

Doctor Flores diagnosed the epidemic as “Directional Monumental Dysorienta (DMD),” defined generally as a co-dependency on historically controversial monuments.

“Without apparent brain damage or cognitive impairment, patients like Todd, Eric, and others are unable to orient within any environment without the presence of a monument memorializing the Confederacy or some form of institutionalized racism in America.”

Other doctors say patients have extreme difficulty distinguishing right from left, following a sequence of directions or retracing a path, but seem to function relatively normally in areas where Confederate statues remain standing.

Early signs of symptoms are almost always followed by an increased defensiveness over some form of nationalist history. Another symptom doctors have noticed is the inability of patients to remember any factually correct United States history before 2016. Because those who suffer from this type of dysorienta are notorious for mixing left and right, they also have a problem with how words often go together when contextualizing history and frequently get defensive over their recollection of historical facts. However, some doctors think that is a coping mechanism for the disease, which is common in other dysorientas.

The epidemic also seems to be spreading at faster rates in middle aged white men with wives named Karen.

Todd was at first shocked and then skeptical when he read recently how Confederate statues are towering tributes to slavery, washing over a history of racism, fear and hate by re-narrating and glorifying the Confederacy as an integral and valid notch in the country’s past. He didn’t remember learning about the glorification of oppression in his grade school history books or from any of his prestigious business degrees, and neither did his friends, so it couldn’t be true. Plus, he didn’t really feel like he “saw color.” It was 2020, afterall. He felt if he argued the importance of the history he remembered against the history the protesters were clearly making up, the deep shame of his broken directional integrity would remain hidden.

One of Richmond’s most successful real estate agents, Chad, was seen hurriedly walking out of Dr. Flores’s office on Monday, gently-but-hastily scratching the top of his head.  Chad owned a Victorian house with big windows on Monument Avenue, the grassy mall in Virginia punctuated by statues memorializing Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Soon after Chad’s mysterious visit to the doctor, he jumped on to a lawsuit filed by five other property owners along the avenue to block the 60-foot Robert E. Lee statue from being removed. At first, he wasn’t really aware what the argument was for keeping the statue up, but knew the mortifying nature of his medical condition would be exposed if another Confederate leader was toppled.

Chad also knew that the concrete leader of the Confederate army, along with the four other memorialized Confederate leaders on the nationally renowned street helped him sell properties for a pretty penny on a street rich with “American legacy and tradition” to investors when they came poking around town for new prospects. Monument Avenue had been studded with monuments of Confederate heroes and lined with stylish mansions that housed business leaders for decades. After some of the mansions were converted to apartment buildings and boarding houses in the early 2000’s, local community leaders “expressed concern” over a “downward slide” in the safety of their neighborhood and soon enough, the mansions were reclaimed by single families who looked and acted like Chad’s. Extra points were silently tallied for potential buyers with wives named Karen. When Chad was asked by reporters why he signed on to the lawsuit, Chad mustered up a sequence of words he heard on Fox News: “We can’t lose a priceless piece of art from the neighborhood all because some misinformed protestors want to demolish our heritage.” Nailed it, he thought, as he wiped a droplet of sweat from his brow.

Eric was found walking in circles around the graffitied remains of the Jefferson Davis Monument on Monument Avenue a couple days ago. He successfully made it to Publix this time, but got lost on his way back, and found himself physically unable to leave the remains of the Davis Monument, thinking he had made it home. As reporters approached, there was a flicker of awe and a glint of arousal in Eric’s eyes, as his gaze scaled the space where Jefferson Davis’s body once stood perched directly in front of the sixty-five-foot erected column with an unidentifiable woman at the top (a vague female statue representing something along the lines of southern womanhood). Eric recalled that his wife once joked it looked like the female figure at the top of the column was getting “boinked” by Davis. His shoulders hunched over under the weight of grocery bags when he spoke timidly into the recorder.

“He seemed like a far more complex man than many people probably realize. Why are we only focusing on one side of history now?”

A reporter approached Todd as he was shopping at the local Food Lion. After his meltdown, Karen agreed to drive to the store this time. Todd didn’t say much, except when he echoed something he saw when scrolling through Facebook for some guidance the night before.

“We can’t facilitate forgetting,” he told the reporter. Doctor Flores noted that the only exception to the symptom of forgetfulness was, what she called, “a mile wide and an inch-deep knowledge of Facebook posts.” Karen, not making eye contact, “hmm’d” in agreement. She was a bit unnerved by the presence of cameras after a recent incident she had at Walmart.

“How else are we going to remember our history, and you know, things like racism?” Todd asked the reporter as he tossed Aunt Jemima syrup, Uncle Ben’s rice, Chiquita bananas, and Land O’ Lakes butter into the grocery cart.

Eric sent all three of his blooming children to Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery, Alabama. When he had gone out to run an errand last month, he didn’t recognize the school after Robert E. Lee’s statue was removed from the public-facing side days before. That’s when the symptoms sparked up for him. Three hours later, Eric was escorted back to his wife, Karen, by the county police. His car had been found an hour out of town, split in half by an oak tree in the Tuskegee National Forest. A short hike from the car led the county police to find Eric lying belly-up under the shade of another tree, whispering nonsense to himself. He couldn’t recall anything after seeing a school he didn’t recognize. Karen, Eric’s wife, confirmed she had sent Eric to pick up dry cleaning, and the school was on the way.

“Something was ‘off’ about the school,” he incessantly repeated to police on the way home.

When reporters asked Eric if he thought it was the monument that triggered his blackout, he didn’t really answer the question. “I mean, is all this really necessary?” he said, gesturing toward a newspaper clipping with a picture of the now empty base and plaque. “You know it’s gone too far when we are indoctrinating our children’s education with this bullshit.”

John, who was meeting some buddies at the local driving range, was rescued by park rangers from Byrd Park lake, out of his sinking suburban. It was one of the more intense cases of DMD. He had gotten lost when he couldn’t find the Christopher Columbus statue, where he knew to make a left. Now that Christopher had been toppled, John not only didn’t know where to make a left, he had no idea where he was spatially, on Earth. In a desperate attempt to direct himself to the golf course he visited once a week for the last four years, he embarked on a frenzied mission to find Christopher’s chiseled jaw and stoic composure so he could restore his sanity. When John found the monument had been lodged headfirst into the lake, he plunged his car into the water, believing he would poof into the parking lot of Byrd Lake Golf Course like nothing ever happened, his friends waiting for him with a Bud Light.

Jerry, a middle-aged-man from Jacksonville, Florida, was seen streaking three gated neighborhoods away from his home, chanting, “They will not replace us they will not replace us they will not replace us…”

Outbreaks like these slightly subsided after President Trump gave a speech at Mount Rushmore on Independence Day, promising that the monument, carved out of stolen Sioux tribal land in 1941, would never be desecrated. Meanwhile, many cities were doing their best to help redirect those who were exhibiting severe symptoms by setting up neighborhood watches. Some cities’ residents even put up signs on the side of roads that read “Don’t know where you are? Give Karen a ring!”

Karens in all infected states felt things had gotten out of hand. Todd’s wife, Karen, was mostly frustrated with her husband losing his mind every time he got behind the wheel, because she needed to borrow the car. Now that all of the restaurants in her state had opened at 50 percent capacity, she could finally use the new “can I speak to your manager” phrases she had been practicing in the mirror for the last two months, to the underpaid staff at the local Olive Garden. She wasn’t even going to wear a mask, because she couldn’t breathe.

Doctor Flores said this form of dysorienta isn’t necessarily contagious, but is triggered by a certain series of events, and can be quelled by the presence of more monuments symbolizing some type of oppression. She and her team discovered that oddly, the virus is actually set off by “what the people putting up the monument thought about history, and less about actual history itself.”

Flores and her team also discovered that during periods of history when Confederate monuments were erected, dysorienta subsided. For example, when monuments were erected decades after the Civil War ended during the time that Jim Crow laws were enacted, there were almost no cases of DMD. The same was true during the 1960’s during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, when another wave of Confederate monuments were built, even though the Civil War had ended in 1865.

Reporters recently approached a bystander that had come to watch another DMD flare up, who happened to be a member of the “Unite the Right” group and a life-long protester of statue removal.

He said, in response to a question about what he thought about the epidemic and statues coming down, he said, “It (the Confederacy) may not represent the best idea we ever had, but if we keep destroying monuments, where does it even stop? George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Lincoln?”

Flores warned reporters, “There is no treatment for this illness, because it is too difficult to detect in its early phases due to the shame associated with being directionally dependent on monuments. The best way public health officials can address this is to let it run its course.” If what Flores says is true, this could be an epidemic that continues to spread for years, as there are over 700 Confederate statues that still remain standing in the United States.

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If you or a friend see a white man in his 40s or 50s wandering frantically outside of their Chevy suburban on the outskirts of town, do not hesitate to call: 1-800-side-effects-of-155-years-of-monumentalizing-racism