Dear diary,
I once watched a sci-fi film in a nearly empty theater; there were only about three other moviegoers watching. And there was this scene where alien spaceships came and hovered over the Earth and sent out some sort of voodoo ray that caused all the electricity of the globe to shut off. And all the automobiles came to a stop, wherever they were, in the street. At this point, an old man at the back of the theater yelled out mockingly:
“That’s stupid! Shutting off the electricity would not stop the cars too! The cars aren’t plugged into the grid — the cars have batteries!”
Hearing this, I thot to myself: That’s neat that the aliens have a way to freeze even the stuff that doesn’t have an electrical cord. I liked this idea: it did not anger me; it allured me.
Now I wish that I, too, owned an alien spaceship, cuz I would make my voodoo ray do other stuff besides shut off all the e-books:
If I zapped the Earth, I would make my power somehow blot out the info from every bank account, and evaporate all the records of personal debt. So nobody on the whole globe would be able to remember how much money anyone had before this day, or who owes what to who.
Then also I would tweak my voodoo force so that it causes the boundary lines of all the countries to fade away, so nobody can see them anymore: they’re as invisible as a pencil mark that got erased. Nobody knows where Alaska ends and Yukon begins. Mexico and the USA now have no Great Wall between them. Russia, China, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Australia, Spain, and Greece (etc.) are all wandering dazed outside of their former bounds and wondering where all the dotted or dashed lines went which previously distinguished them — nobody would know which country was where, because of the evil effect of my alien voodoo beam.
Just think about what would happen if those things really happened. If we woke up today and nobody had any money or debt, and no countries existed. Now it’s just a whole bunch of people on the Earth, and no obligations or incentives between us except for our natural necessities. Would humankind be able to continue existing?
The crux is: Is there a sufficient amount of humans who will freely undertake the job of producing food, clothing, shelter (etc.) and distributing these basic needs to all, without any hope of a monetary reward?
My own guess is that there are plenty of people who’d do these acts voluntarily. You’d have to beat them back with a stick to get them to stop trying to help out their fellow living creatures. I say that people naturally want to help others: they long to be useful, and they take the survival of our species as a self-evident good.
So that’s why I like human beings. They’re mostly decent people. They have a tendency to rise to the occasion:
When disaster strikes, such as a worldwide flood, humans do not stand around calculating how much they should charge each drowning person to receive rescuing — no, most humans simply dive into the floodwaters and pull their fellows to safety, purely on instinct. (Humans are natural-born saviors.)
Likewise, if we rent a spaceship and spritz the voodoo ray at Earth which causes all money, debt, and national borders to vanish, here is how most human beings react:
Instead of dashing back into their mansion and rummaging thru their writing desk and finding a notebook and a quill pen and madly scribbling a whole bunch of pictographs down on the page in order to calculate the compounding interest for whatever loans they intend to inflict upon their brethren, they simply get in touch with their local community and ask “What can I do to help out?”
And each local community is a group of no more than 100 people, and they have elected a single speaker to give voice to their group-decisions, who transparently meets with the leaders of all the nearby hundred-strong communities. So this is how mankind cohered and sustained itself as a species after Bryan Ray’s Space Prank:
Humans realized that the idea of strangely shaped countries with drunkenly drawn borders was unnecessary and even an hindrance to harmony. It was much easier just to break up into small groups, which communicate back and forth publicly and harbor no secrets.
Another fun trick would be if we could figure out a way for the voodoo beam to jam up all firearms and rocket launchers. So, then, none of the nuclear weapons could function; and probably even the bowling alleys would need to shut down because our voodoo spell would not be able to distinguish between a bowling ball and a cannonball. So you could try to bowl a strike, but the ball would just hover in mid air, wherever you let go of it, cuz it would be thinking:
“I am a dangerous projectile & not a sports gizmo.”
This would be due to our poorly programmed algorithm. That’s the fault of my boss, Mr. Ron, who is a sloppy computer technician and a bad project manager; nonetheless, I awarded him the contract to devise the code for my voodoo ray, on account of cronyism (which is rampant among us extraterrestrial philanthropists).
Seriously, tho: How would the world look, if my flying saucer that’s shaped like a horseshoe magnetized up all the firearms, bombs, and explosives? — I say, mankind would find it necessary to revert to doing battle with brazen cudgels. We’d have to gather up all our third-place racing trophies and melt them down; and some charity organization, consisting of volunteers from various churches, would need to find a way to mass produce billy clubs, maces, bludgeons, truncheons, and blackjacks from our huge vat of molten bronze.
And then We the People would be forced to get back in shape, cuz one needs physical strength to wield a blunt object (as opposed to simply pressing a button labeled “Nuke ’em”, or using your finger to squeeze the trigger of a gun, which can be accomplished by the paunchiest essay writer).
But the question remains: What would be the purpose of any skirmishing, now that we’ve each got our new government-issued cudgel? For behold: all the food and clothing and shelter and medical supplies are being administered and distributed by happy folks who simply love pleasing their fellow beings. So everyone has all that they require to live and flourish; and most people have habituated themselves to simply reclining on the hills and watching the sky, or studying leaves of grass, or smelling the air. Some people chase birds around; and others watch these bird-chasers chase birds. Some creative individuals have even developed a saddle that can be used to ride wild lions; so they embark on lamb-hunting quests that last for about a week; after which, they release the lion back into the desert, and the beast sprints off with a renewed appreciation for its customary loneliness.
The answer is: We wouldn’t desire to fight over anything anymore, for we would be too busy enjoying the Lost City of Gold, which we stumbled upon at long last. Now, nobody is bored; no one is jealous or resentful. The most luxurious regret that we can drum up, during our annual “Pity Thyself” Contest, is that we melted down all our racing trophies to make these totally useless brazen weapons. — Luckily, however, we have most of our stock-car performances saved on tape, in our collection of videocassettes; and the races where we placed are labeled with a star decal on the casing, so they’re easy to find. Now all we need is a friend who is willing to watch them.
No comments:
Post a Comment