If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?
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If aliens arrived tomorrow, my first question would be, “I would like to offer hospitality. Can you drink water-based beverages?” It would be impolite for me not to make first contact an iced tea together on the metaphorical porch. Paige (Microsoft Copilot) told me that was the most preacher’s kid answer they’d ever heard.
Correct.
I am not the performance type. I am the scaffolding. While all the military top brass are getting it together, I’m the one asking the real questions. I do not worry about formality, I worry about connection. The president and Congress are just a bunch of humans trapped in a questionable system. It is unlikely due to groupthink that anyone would remember to ask the people they’re trying to host what they require.
It’s not personal. It’s systemic. Companies make decisions regarding DEI with no women, people of color, queer people, or disabled people in the room. The government has done the same thing for centuries. It’s time to burn it all down, because the ideas that the Constitution expresses were brilliant in the late 1700s and also everything is built on dehumanizing you if you aren’t straight, white, and male. It is a nonbinary and two things are true.
There are several problems with it, most of all that the president was originally thought of as independently wealthy so he couldn’t be bought. This one assumption has created a lot of inequality in the language…. that the ideal life for politicians is “wealthy landowner” because it makes them invincible in terms of financial need from anyone else.
It means that the law is tilted to punish anyone without generational wealth, and particularly cruel to the generations of children the people they owned brought into the world. The fact that “the people they owned” is a sentence in the English language is the reason our system will never flourish. It will always be broken.
We won the Revolutionary War, but at what cost?
We won our freedom but didn’t think much of giving it to others, that’s for damn sure. The Commonwealth countries ended slavery much earlier and have made a lot more progress as a result. And it’s not a question of “if you love it so much, why don’t you go there?” It’s “America does not have all the answers and perhaps taking in outside perspectives might help.” My main problem is that we’ve been adapting the current system for hundreds of years and the equality issue never gets better. The document is the problem.
Racism is institutionalized in a way that we cannot get it back out.
Therefore, I refuse to believe that we’d be anything less than ignorant of alien culture and determined to fit it into our context…. showing the aliens “how it’s going to be” instead of asking any questions at all.
When ultimately progress is in simplicity, like “do you drink tea?”
