Zagaron

Argh.  It's too early, but I managed to totally forget to post something today due to a combination of baking cookies, Homestuck and Adventure Time/Regular Show anticipation.  Also probably still getting used to this whole thing as a habit.  But enough self-indulgence about me.  Because it's almost 2 am, I'll post something I wrote earlier.  I was hoping to save this for a bigger emergency post, but whatever, now my crutch is knocked out from under me.  This thing is kind of political, but mostly just satire (I guess) and I wrote it when I was very disillusioned and disappointed with the world in general.

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This essay is something very deeply personal to me.  For years now I have despaired at the powerful climate of anti-intellectualism in the world in general, and the United States in specific.  People celebrate their ignorance, believing their hateful small-mindedness brings them closer to a cold and distant deity.  Equality for all humanity is the fever-dream of the masses, publicly stated and soundly rebuffed in private.  The wealthy sacrifice hordes of the less-fortunate to supplement their extravagance; racism is disguised as fear of and concern for “illegal immigration” or “terrorist activity”.  The vital importance of the planet’s ecosystem is ignored so those who have more than enough might obtain just a bit extra, and any creature not shaped like us (and even a fair few that are) is considered either a food source or a nuisance.  I am disgusted that I must live in a world so consumed with self-interest, self-absorption, and self-righteousness.  And so, I no longer will.
 

I am returning to my home planet of Zagaron, which lies in a solar system many millions of light years away.  The planet Zagaron is populated by a species which is physically identical to human beings for reasons too complicated to go into now.  On Zagaron, everyone dresses and behaves exactly like your Old West cowboys; it is thought, by leading scientists, that your Western-themed television broadcasts (Gunsmoke et al.) were sent back in time thousands of years by a black hole and arrived on our planet in time to shape our entire culture.  Despite this cultural backlog, the inhabitants of Zagaron (we call ourselves Hooblars) are a deeply respectful and peaceful society.  Once, we were extremely wasteful and cruel; entire ecosystems were razed to recreate the dust-blown plains we saw in our ancestral telenovellas.  Species were driven to extinction in constant cattle-rustlings, dawn-lit duels, and tumbleweed races.
 

We have, however, abandoned these practices so that we may begin to heal our fragile earth.  Where once were enormous drills trying to access our planet’s rich mineral wealth of jundlebeeb crystals, now there are wildlife sanctuaries and arboretums.  Museums form the majority of our public entertainment, and though we have not forgotten our cultural tendency toward hootenannies, we now strive for a future in which no Hooblar must toil in the gaxbone fields just to earn enough tulgos to feed his family (or “shripwrast”).  We offer equality to all creatures, on Zagaron.  Desperadoes who are sexually attracted to other desperadoes have all the same rights as desperadoes who are sexually attracted to saloon-girls, just as the dark-skinned mosiers of the south have the same rights as the blue-skinned side-saddler’s of the east.
 

On Zagaron, we have done away with money.  Items are provided as needed, free of charge to anyone and everyone.  There is no poverty, just as there is no wealth.  Once, long before this revolutionary development, a Hooblar couldn’t close his or her eyes without the constant sound of stage-coach robberies and barroom brawls over card sharks keeping him from his well-deserved shut-eye.  Sure, we still have bad people.  Banditos and crooked varmints are still put in the pokey by star-badged sheriffs.  You can never totally do away with the viler nature of a society, all that can be done is to prevent it from overtaking the world.  Robber-barons no longer run our railroads and townships, trying to run settlers off their homesteads to claim the land in order to access valuable rogarth oil!  Our government is a meritocracy, where no politician is permitted to serve longer than two frimpits (approximate to your Earth-years).  Each man or woman puts the good of the public before their own for this period of service, and the rights of Hooblars are maintained.  

So I leave this missive, carved into your Earth-Moon, as a message to the greatest of you.  Do not allow the petty and the cruel to rule your world any longer; stand up and say that you want a world of equality between sexes, between races, between sexual orientations, between man and wilderness: a world where the golden chaps of office can be worn by any pilgrim.  Until this time, I must take my leave of your decreasingly verdant and beautiful world.  Perhaps, someday, I shall return.  But as I bid you adieu, I must now ride off, into the sunset.  In a spaceship.