To the leader of the Free World(or his secretary of state):
I believe I come from a distant planet and belong to a distant species that unlike humans have some sort of self restraint. There are few of us left. Most of us are incarcerated in what you people call universities; some of us have found a haven in lower level schools where we manage to transmit our ideas to your young in hopes of saving even a marginally small fraction of your world and still others have escaped and are called radically liberal by your people. Though most of what I believe seems to come from what your society disbelieves and not from factual evidence of my home planet I still think it forms an important part of the intrinsic values we follow at home. On my home planet, Sanity, we believe the following:
-We believe in equal opportunity for men and women. Studies, as well as simple observation have shown us that women can perform as well as men in perhaps all areas. Of the past four Sanity presidents three have been women. We share responsibility with them in all aspects of life, though we still have to find a way to share the experience of pregnancy fully. I am not worried; our best scientists are hard at work to find how. You might say we are a utopia in the equality of sexes though I assure you this is not true. There is no perfect distribution of opportunity between men and women; and yet we try. We do not perform in Help the Women events nor do we pretend to encourage their voice while making sure that no one hears them. We at least, are true in this.
-We believe in peace, not war. Though admittedly we have fought wars, our idealist train of thought developed much in the same fashion as your hippy years without the excessive pot smoking and rampant promiscuity (though we may have indulged a bit here and there). Your whole concept- si vis pacem para bellum – makes as much sense as a cat riding a dog riding a horse. You must begin to understand that economic and military war is not the best way to solve issues between nations. It is only a way to leave issues unresolved until future wars. Do you really want another after- WWI scenario? Do you really want an embittered country hungry for revenge?
We believe in our history. We tend to study it to avoid calamities instead of repeating them. Is it perhaps you did not notice how the way history, your history especially, has patterns. Every two hundred years one of your great civilizations loses super-power status and still you take no measures to prevent this. Have you given up? Do you see it as unstoppable? Then England’s system broke down and now the US is letting its system break down. And before them it was the Romans and the Egyptians and the Persians (must I go on?). I can only give you one piece of advice: practice what you preach. You have politicians and other big-shot nobodies claiming that history is an important subject because it helps us avoid previous mistakes and yet, it is usually the subject that gets the least attention. It is the subject that fewer undergraduates study. Why? You create your own despair and yet you are surprised by what happens. How could racism go wrong? Wasn’t apartheid right? It seems you haven’t realized that you are the masters of your own ill written faith. History means something and though I am sure you can’t really tell what the difference between Neanderthal and cave men is, I can tell you this: History is important. Get it through your head, or it will.
-We believe in altruism. This is to say, we believe in helping each other not out of social compromise or public relations reasons but because it is right. How do we determine what’s right? By seeing your wrongs. We host no fancy galas where people dine on geese and pheasant and pate de foie while deciding whether to feed beans or rice to orphans. We have no hypocritical self-named stars that contribute money just to get their pictures taken. We have problems: hunger, orphans, tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes. We are not impervious to damage or catastrophe and I would lie if I said that we are close to solving all these problems, but at least we do not waste hundreds of millions of dollars a year on bureaucrats that try to solve our problems. Oddly, you pay these bureaucrats to draw up solutions and when they arrive to them you disregard them completely saying either: the time is not right or, it is too expensive. Funny how it isn’t “too expensive” to support a 10 billion dollar institution a year but when it comes to listening to this institution it is. Why do you do this? Because this way, it looks like you are doing something, like you care for the starved in the sub-Saharan region.
I write this to you, the leader of the free world, because I believe you will do what is right for your race. You will read some meaning into these words and use it to right your wrongs although, in true human fashion I expect you to disregard this letter and pass it along to some sort of office assistant that will no doubt, after skimming it, send it in a chain email or shred it thoroughly in his brand new Dell shredder. I ask you to do some soul searching; look for common sense. Trust me it works. The citizens of sanity use it and it has the annoying habit of making us live better lives. I sincerely hope this provides you with some insight as to what my planet does and what yours failed miserably to do. I wish to stress the importance of this letter; you must consider this a warning. We are a peaceful planet and we wish you no harm. The destruction of your planet (something you’ll achieve in about fifty years either to massive flooding in the polar ice caps or nuclear holocaust) will leave the universe out of balance. Like any ecosystem the universe needs a balance and it would seek it in some creatures much like yourselves. Then, we’ll have to worry about a new set of thought developing primates that think they own the world and are gods(whoever he is) of to the universe.
Yours truly,
An inhabitant of Sanity
P.S. Love the music
