As we all watch America circle the drain as it decays in nearly every way, people constantly ask “what can we do to turn it around?” And the answer is inevitably, “nothing, we’re too far gone.”
Personally, I have made it clear, over and over, that as a country, we are in for another resurgence amongst the world and domestically. There will be another economic boom and decade of prosperity similar to that which some of us lived through in the 90’s. There will be relative peace again, for a time, across the globe. These things will happen again, as they are cyclical and history shows us that they reoccur. We had a decade of total prosperity with nary a care in the world following World War II. Everyone was getting fat dumb and happy and it felt like nothing was possibly wrong in the world. Then in the 90’s, we once again all thought that we were printing money and we’d never run out of ink.
Of course keep in mind that during the 50’s, blacks couldn’t vote and women knew their place or else. During the 90s, gays couldn’t marry and we all walked around like narcissistic assholes competing with one another over who had the bigger bottle of water to suckle from. America, as a financial system and a working country, will surge once again sometime soon. Americans will continue to de-evolve into some sort of human version of a primordial ooze, unfit for actual life on the planet.
Our society is gone. We care so little about ourselves and one another that all hope is lost. We use Social Media as a means to hurt strangers, destroy the careers of people we barely know, and make outlandish claims that could be proven untrue in nanoseconds if only anyone knew what actual research and facts were anymore. We are a nation of infants, incapable of rational conversation and overly obsessed with truly stupid and unimportant dalliances into video games, the Kardashians, sports, and phony allergies. We are done. Face it; our culture is finished, and no amount of increased employment, home ownership, or better wages is going to change that fact.
And so I come to you now with a desperate, final proposal to fix out culture; the death ray.
It is my fervent belief that all of us, at some point in our lives, have wished that we could kill people with our eyes, or our finger gun, or a thought. For me, those thoughts began at the age of 5 when some punk older kid thought he could bully his way into a baseball game we were playing without him. Instead, I took the punch, and he and I became best friends for the next 15 years, and then we lost touch. In other words, the death ray would have been preferable; it would have sent a message and it would have spared me the pain of losing a friend for no reason other than we both found more interesting friends. Life is cruel, but we can make it less cruel.
I believe that I can sell this across all generations. Millennials and their parents will love the idea for the very obvious reason of pain avoidance as just laid out. Generation X-ers like me love the proposal because it will “teach people lessons,” and we grew up in Reagan’s America, where people had to pay for being whatever it was we deemed to be wrong or weird. It wasn’t just the Soviets we took down in the 80’s, we also destroyed America’s mentally ill, any hope of curing AIDS before it became an epidemic, and we put Muammar Gaddafi in a box by murdering his children. The 80s were all about strength through vengeance against those who were somewhere between legitimately evil and “just a little different.”
As for everyone else, those already in the “get off my lawn,” demographic, the death ray sells itself. It works thusly:
All Americans, 26 and older (sorry, but the American Government currently qualifies anyone under the age of 27 as a child, so society shall as well for this policy) will immediately be fitted with the American Death Ray (you know it already exists, right)? Having it installed is a semi-painful procedure involving removal of your eye-ball, but don’t worry, under my plan, it will all be covered by Obamacare.
Until every LEGAL American has one, none of them will work. Once installed across the population, the death ray works as follows; you will be able to randomly murder anyone you like by simply squinting at them and saying the phrase “die scum, die.” The ray will work for as far as the eye can see and will also work via the internet, thus allowing you to murder randomly from the comfort of your toilet while perusing social media. There will be no limits placed on the living things you can kill; that stupid fern that seems to mock your very existence by clinging to life one day and then being vibrant and green the next day is as on the table as that kid down the street who bounces his basketball while you’re trying to sleep. Most of us will probably use our death ray on the road, where we seem to think that a person who drives below the speed limit or drifts into our lane for a moment deserves to die. Others will use their death ray in drunken rages at bars, or at sporting events when they see someone having the audacity to root for a team other than theirs.
Here’s the catch; each of us only gets 10 kills. Ever. In our entire lives. And none of us will know how many kills anyone else has left. All of that information will be stored in a giant facility in Utah, guarded by robot soldiers and impenetrable to any number of death rays. This will force all of us to walk out of our homes each day with a healthy cocktail of one part confidence, one part vigilance, and one part humility. If we don’t want to waste a kill, we may be more apt to focus on the road. If we’re unsure of the number of kills a random stranger has, we may be less inclined to make an inappropriate comment about his girlfriend. If we’re prone to crime, and we have no way of knowing if our victim has any death ray murders left, we will be less likely to commit said crimes and more likely to get a fucking job. It’s a perfect cure for what ails this nation; strength through death.
Fear motivates, after all. This is proven. With rare exception, it is only the legitimate fear of losing our lives that causes most of us to ever act heroically. Almost everyone works out of a fear of poverty or being cast as a “loser.”
Ironically, fear also cripples. The unbearable thought of being turned down by the hot girl at the bar is what keeps so many young men from actually asking her out. Imagine the power of knowing you could murder her if she says no, yet the added fear of knowing she could murder you just for asking. Or, open your mind really wide and imagine what might happen if both the shy young man and the hot bartender have no death ray kills left and are forced to actually talk with one another. Perhaps a connection only found these days on E-Harmony is created. And joy begins anew in America.
