Washington, D.C. Well, guess who got the last laugh, after all! Those Zany Republicans were on to something with all their doom and gloom over the advent of Obamacare. They told us the world as we knew it, and everyone in it, would be destroyed, obliterated in one fell swoop by Father Death and his minions.

And we, foolish mortals that we were, laughed at the Republicans. Laughed at how childish they sounded, as if this were just the next round of “death panels”. So we called them out for what we erroneously thought they were: liars, self-aggrandizers, posturing pols of the worst sort, government shut-downers, the whole lot of them seeming like cockroaches caught in a midnight panic when someone turns on the kitchen light.

“Obamacare is Coming!” they shout as they scatter. “Obamacare is Coming!”

But now we know they weren’t kidding us. Now that the world has actually fallen apart with the beginning of this first day of Obamacare. Understandably, this is what happens when 30 million impoverished Americans get health care insurance for the first time. The world comes to an end.

I feel the need to apologize to those apostles of doom.

“I’m sorry, Republicans!” I plead in my heart, not certain they could hear me if I shouted it from housetops. “Can you forgive me for not believing in you? And for thinking you were acting like the weak-spined, unsavory, unprincipled piggish pawns of the 1% you seemed to be. C’mon, how many teachers or lunch bucket voters could give a good God Damn about running an oil pipeline across our corn belt? Or feel the need to shut down Head Start? Naturally I mistook you for troublemakers and political terrorists of the worst sort. So hungry to prevent Obamacare from starting up and perhaps, worst of all, succeeding, you would actually shut down the very government we all rely on, the same government you were sent to help run.

But I didn’t realize what was at stake.

Now I understand what you Republicans tried to say to us, as I look around at all the destruction and chaos. No buildings above 15 feet in height left standing, the roads totally logjammed with burnt out cars, trucks and buses. The streets eerily empty of human life.

You knew and we wouldn’t believe.

Shame on us.

Shame on us for thinking so badly of you. Shame on us for thinking you hated poor people, women, gays, students, the elderly and minorities. Forgive us for thinking you were the mindless pawns of the billionaires’ plutocracy.

We’ll know better the next time.