My father used to say: "Time was invented so everything doesn't happen all at once. Distance was invented so everything doesn't happen to you."

Maybe he read that, or maybe he heard it from some weary half-a-thief in the days when my father tended bar.

I've lived in some big cities, but I've lived the last 28 years of my life in Fall River, Massachusetts, a city that shares its size, racial makeup and withered industrial muscle with Kenosha, Wisconsin. I was a reporter in Fall River, and I'm a radio talk show host now.

My city has a good-sized crime problem, and an elephant of a heroin problem, but its very smallness makes you feel insulated from history. By the time the big issues get here, they're usually pretty tired.

"Once in a while, it's a great comfort to live in the middle of nowhere," I wrote on Sept. 11, after a day grimly "localizing" the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City. "Muslim terrorists are not going to crash a plane into our city hall."

Time and distance.

Kenosha is pretty far from Fall River, but I don't have to go there to know what it's like. It's an unfashionable place, as cities this size are, a little grim, a little dopey, inclined to "he said, she said" political arguments among the city councilors.

And as the fire rises in Kenosha, I feel the heat.

Some kid, some pudgy little weasel I could have knocked down with a punch, shot a couple of people during the riots in Kenosha. He's white, so he was arrested without incident, and there is no doubt he will soon be pronounced "mentally ill" or maybe "troubled."

Knocked down with a punch? Naah.

The kid looks like what my pop used to call a "slap job," by which he meant the guy wasn't worth a punch, just a slap.

And it's true. I could have slapped the kid's nose off his face, and he'd have gone home and cried himself to sleep. It's probably happened to him before.

But he had a gun. A big gun, too. And so he was a soldier, a patriot, a warrior for some simpler, whiter America he doesn't even remember.

My father and three of his brothers served in World War II, three of them in combat areas. The only one of them ever to touch a gun after coming home was the one who became a cop.

"I don't think it's safe to have a gun in the house," my father said when I started hunting at 15.

Pop wasn't a slap job, either. Once, tending bar, he broke the nose of a patron who fired a gun into the ceiling.

"What the hell," Pop said. "He could have killed somebody."

I'm getting old, and my memories of World War II's heroes are becoming inconvenient, a living reproach to the "military hobbyists" who are likely to go crazy at any moment, who are itching to kill their own people, and who then go home where it's safe and warm and there is always crunchy peanut butter in the cabinet.

Time and distance.

I'm not very important, but I've been writing and broadcasting unkind things about Donald Trump for a number of years now, awful, terrible things about racists and gun-fondling paramilitaries, and guys who wear camouflage pants to the grocery store.

Probably, nothing will ever happen to me. I live in a small place, like Kenosha.

But if anyone comes for me with a gun, either some pudgy freelancer or what I'm sure will eventually be Trump's secret police, I intend to force a perfect act of contrition through my mind, just as the nuns taught me to do.

And I hope, I really hope, that I can force myself to look up and say, "What took ya so long, ya slap job?"

To find out about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest face slap of a book, "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America" is a collection of his best columns, and is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, GooglePlay and iBooks.