Alien Newsletter #6: Damage Control
Wherein our alien correspondent explores the subject of reparations, and contemplates the debts for which no payment exists
Thee Network Note: We cannot know for certain whether or not our alien visitor can literally see color or distinguish specific nationalities yet in the way humans do, but from the appearance of its latest communique to its home terrain, it apparently has been making a game attempt to do so in order to communicate the historically and emotionally fraught topic of collective reparations. In it, the alien reveals a portion of its own history as it attempts to make sense of our own.
Most of those listening to this may just barely recall learning about a grim moment from our civilization’s past. This centered around a vicious, sustained attack delivered upon our then-physical home by a diabolical mob of asteroids which led to the deaths of 90% of our population and blotted the light from two of our three suns. Those of us who survived petitioned the skies, clamoring for a return to what was taken so cruelly from us, but from our centuries-long Forced Restoration project, we discovered two important things during our lengthy prosecution of the asteroids for their misdeeds:
Asteroids are not sentient.1
Even if they were, many of the changes they wreaked upon the planet and its environment were permanent and irreversible. Were it possible to extract blood from these celestial stones, it could only be used as a partial down payment towards our future.
It is through this lens that I report upon the current undertakings of several subsets of Greatest Apes towards an accounting of historical impositions of the more powerful upon the less so. Many of the longest-running efforts are concentrated in the North Hemisphere Plate 2, with several notable efforts in the past focused upon one of the Mass Supersimian Levellings of the past century, within the Modern Hohenzollern region of the Higher European Subsector 1 towards the Judaic Tribes currently in possession of the Holy Lands discussed in a previous communique. I am uncertain of the stressors this has placed upon the finances of this once powerful dynasty, nor am I privy to the ongoing struggles the area, now rebranded as Germany, faces now that they are in negotiations with the state of Namibia for prior actions delivered upon two of the resident tribes there. What I do know is that the current heir of the modern Hohenzollerns now works part-time in a wedding party covers group called Royal Groovin’, so I can only imagine the size of the debt was quite significant.
The circumstances rest upon the very foundation of the global civilization created over the course of the past millennia, and from all accounts, it was quite a messy, bloody undertaking. Many of those who have endeavored to build these empires, or who first lived upon the land masses where this power is concentrated, have long agitated for recompense, appealing upon the stated virtues and the uniquely super simian concepts of “justice” for their suasion. However, this does not fully encompass all of the efforts that have been collected under the term of “reparations.” For instance, within the North Hemisphere Plate 2, a massive internment project was waged upon its Japanese immigrants during the Second of that decade’s massive conflicts — all while the sons of some of those detained fought for the very country that detained their parents, in the 100th Infantry Battalion. The NHP2 Greatest Apes would later pay $20,000 in reparations towards the survivors of this internment.
However, it must be acknowledged that perhaps the most successful reparations campaign to date was the one inflicted upon the French towards the Haitian subsection of Hispaniola. After a long and bloody revolution after which the African slaves of the region overthrew their former masters, the losing side demanded 150 million (later reduced to 60) gold francs for their lost plantations. Since theirs was a superior force which had forced the new republic into penury, the Haitians had no choice but to comply, only clearing the books by 1947. The message seems clear: if one wants to be truly made whole for one’s quantified sufferings, the threat of force and devastating violence certainly comes in handy.
Moreover, most who clamor for these actions assume that those in a higher social strata will willingly cede their elevated social positions absent such demonstrations of overwhelming force. Much of what reparations pivot upon is a concept called “wealth redistribution,” which traditionally only happens after a long, painful conflict of which the Greatest Apes are so fond of inflicting upon each other. No matter the strength of such arguments, there are strong indicators that their persuasive power ebbs considerably over time, leaving more coercive and destructive options as the only ones left. It should be noted that when selected, force, brutality and above all luck, rather than the often evoked supersimian concepts of virtue and justice, tend to win out more often than not in these sorts of battles.
Nevertheless, some smaller communities are currently attempting to answer these calls. Some cities and states in North Hemisphere Plate 2 such as Evanston, IL, Providence, RI, Detroit, MI and Asheville, NC have already begun their reparations committees to assess and in some cases repay the descendants of slavery and/or historical racism from the damage the communities have suffered. The NHP2 state of California, considered one of the wealthiest land masses on this planet, have already set the stage for reparations for both its indigenous population as well as its African descendants. However, on the NHP2 federal level, a proposal to study the issue has stalled in its House of Representatives after a bill to study the issue passed committee for the first time since it was proposed in 1989.
My sense it is at heart an issue of sublimated anger and rage — the classic “zero-sum” game, as the wisdom-keepers of the planet prefer to call it. One observer put it in inspiring if naive terms: “What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal… Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.” But it appears to me that no matter what determination is made at the table, unless redemption follows repentance and prior claims to domination or victimhood are relinquished, one subset will walk away feeling it didn’t get anywhere near enough; a subset from other side will walk away fuming they lost more than they should have. And the cycle continues.
As our own history tells us, we ended up punishing the asteroids by crushing them into smaller and smaller asteroids, until there was nothing left other than neutrinos that could hardly harm a speck of sand. Yet we all recognized, the 10% of us that were left, that we had inhaled part of the dust from those asteroids had stripped us of the 5-dimensional sight we had previously enjoyed. I know too little of these Greatest Apes to stand judgment upon their disputes. I can only hope they do not have to learn what we did the hard way.
Dark Matters
While the African descendants of North Hemisphere Plate 2 await their reckoning, the date of their ancestors’ discovery of their liberation, named Juneteenth, is now a US Federal Holiday, thereby unleashing the inevitable flurry of commemorative postage stamps, profile picture augmentations and website flash sales.
One of the Greatest Apes’s most powerful mandarins, a soon-to-be-former leader of the planet’s largest e-commerce site, will be taking a trip alongside his brother as the first human passenger of his own space travel company, Blue Origin. Already a petition has been started to prevent his re-entry into earth. Should he resist, another initiative to force-feed him the Mona Lisa awaits in the wings.
One of the Apes’ Macrodrones comes dangerously close to finding out the War-game Theater we have erected at the poles of the fifth planet. We must maintain surveillance upon this.
One cannot judge our forebears too harshly for their assumption on this matter. In times prior, existing records show a distressing amount of calcified matter from our ancestors metabolized by a series of rocks that would attack and eat their prey by rolling them over. I was taken aback by a species of vegetable matter called “tumbleweeds” as well as a very popular and ancient sound group named after such stones, but can safely reassure that none of these monsters currently populate this planet — yet.