Raised as fat, capitalistic pigs with intrinsic senses of entitlement, we forget that our problems are insignificant when compared to other citizens of this planet.
I was at LaGuardia Airport last week during the blackout and overheard a hysterical woman speaking to a reporter amongst crying babies and other stranded passengers tearfully cry out, “It’s like a Third World nation!”
Really?
A Third World nation.
Like Darfur? That kind of Third World nation?
Hmmm…funny I didn’t realize that LaGuardia was that bad off. I was under the impression that once the power came back on, everyone would be able to fly down to see Mickey Mouse in an air conditioned airplane. That doesn’t sound so horrible.
Recently, I was walking home late at night and heard a couple fighting. The man was enraged and was screaming, “I can’t believe you slept with him!”
In their world, her act of infidelity created a nuclear holocaust. I wanted to empathize with the husband but in relation to the grand scale of the universe—Who cares if she slept with another man? So her molecules interacted with another set of molecules instead of his molecules. So what.
I looked up at the sky and looked at the stars. Since I live in Queens, I couldn’t see that many because of the city lights. I reached into my head and remembered how many stars I use to see at night when I grew up in Texas. It seemed like a million holes of light seeping through but in reality a human can only view about 6,000 stars with the naked eye under perfect conditions.
We are but a speck of dust in the outer fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy that is but a grain of sand in the observable Universe.
Sagan claimed that there are billions of billions of stars in our Universe. Each star possibly sustaining several planets, one of which that may contain life. Our world has six billion human beings. So feasibly, each star could create six billion intelligent creatures.
With that said, will the Universe suffer if one individual cheats on another individual? I imagined another couple on the opposite end of the Universe.
(Sirens are screaming at ear-piercing level. People are stampeding by with no sense of direction. A digital marquee sign showing the temperature at 145 degrees.)
MAN:
I can’t believe you slept with him?
WOMAN:
Are you kidding me?
MAN:
What you mean?
WOMAN:
The Sun is about to explode and you are going to bring that up AGAIN??
MAN:
Yeah, I’m going to bring it up.I don’t give a damn if the Sun is going to blow up.
WOMAN:
You are pathetic! It was two years ago. When are you going to stop punishing me? We are going to die! He’s going to die!
MAN:
Was he bigger than me?
WOMAN:
You’re an idiot! We are going to die! He’s going to die! Who cares if he was bigger!
MAN:
HA! So he was bigger, I knew you it! You are such a slu…
(Sun explodes.)
