Welcome, my exhausted little American, welcome to the future! I understand you’d like to recline on our sunny beaches and trail your worn feet in our toasty-hot waters, picnic beneath our wild cornfields and sip on our rustic homebrewed beer, but first, I need to introduce you to the ways of our world.
Because we did it. We science-ed and we logic-ed and we overthrew. Gone are the days of laboring for Big Brother, your sweat-stained bills disappearing up his sleeve every April. Gone are the days of toiling to send bread and bacon to those whose hands are soft. You’re free! And best of all? There’s no guilt.
The poor and the crippled and the lame and the blind – they’ll never starve on the outskirts of your banquet again. You want to know why?
The single moms, we’ve given them scales of shimmering aerogal and tails as long as their steel cables of hair, and now they frolic with their guppies in the glowing hydrogen ocean of Jupiter.
The disabled we’ve given the dignity of leaving behind your medicare dollars – they don’t need it on Iapetus’s icy tundras. They bound through the sky with the weight of a frisbee and slide down their Herculean mountain range on silver sleighs, their sweet laughter echoing across the craters and refracting off the snowflakes catching in their chinchilla-thick fur.
The multi-millionaire CEOs, well, we’ve given them all they desire. They were delivered to 55 Cancri e, the diamond planet, to strategically negotiate and trade their claims until they can buy out their competitors and declare themselves King of the Diamond Empire. We haven’t heard one demand for subsidies or grants or 20-billion-dollar bailouts; too high and mighty are they to speak to we who tread on mere dirt.
The homeless, never more will they burden your paycheck or your heart. They have skin as tough as obsidian now, and lungs that pump sulfur dioxide into laughing gas. We’ve shipped them away to Ios, to dance in the glow of a million volcanoes and sing a stormy hymn a million miles from your tender ears.
The elderly we’ve sent off to Pluto, where the light of the stars are never to be dimmed by the cold and distant sun. Their time may be brief, but as they sit atop silent hills of peaceful graves, they may bask in the true glory of the universe to which they will soon return.
The criminals we’ve fired off towards HD 189733 b, never again to dine off our dollar. There, the murderers and shoplifters and wage-thefters and ecstasy-chasers can dodge shards of glass like they once dodged justice, crashing through the air on thousand-miles-an-hour winds until they drown in a misty cloud of their own blood.
The military, the young and strong who spent our peacetime lifting and studying and eating and sleeping while we footed the bill? We’ve given them iron talons to carry $8,000 guns and $8,000,000 tanks, and iron wings to bear them to Titan. They’re out there now, conquering mighty water-spewing cryovolcanoes and defending chasms veined with treasure, all without the weight of a single civilian hanging over their crown-wreathed heads.
And the rest of the government, the EPA and the FDA and the USDA and all the blank-blank-As who turned our cash into baby gates controlling the water we could drink and food we could sell and cars we could drive? They were cast off to Proxima Centauri B, and last I heard, their young ones swim in seas of crisp filtered water and race through valleys of transplanted rice twice as nutritious as ours, a utopia that will far outlive the cracking remains of our home.
The children we’ve saved for last, to put that good heart of yours to ease. You don’t need to fund their health or future anymore – they’re no longer your nieces and neighbors, no longer yours to care for. We diverted the billions of your hard-earned cash flowing towards bombs for refugee camps and rockets for hospitals, and redirected it towards our babies instead.
Their genes we liquified and reformed until our progeny were molded into hearty little trolls, so strong and tough that even the most delicate-hearted among us smiled as they were flown away, to pick sweet black fruit and dig cozy cave-homes in the rocky hills of Gliese 581 c. They’ll learn the meaning of friendship and the value of a hard day’s work, collaborating to thrive under the divine beauty of a perpetual sunrise.
And you – are you not happy? Would a handmade parasol bring you cheer? Will some water – freshly boiled just an hour past – rejuvenate that wilted smile?
Oh, I recognize that look. The chuckle of a grandmother, the squeal of a child, the smile on the face of your blind friend Minta as she strokes her guitar during your daughter’s 4th birthday party when the clown didn’t show and the bored kids were about to lose it…nostalgia is no stranger to me. The tanks and the millionaires were hardly missed, but for the rest? Just look up. They’re out there, past your responsibility, but still in your heart.
Still unhappy? Oh, don’t worry, my dear. I see those gray hairs. You’ll join them soon enough.