The Onion Bagel is a satirical column for The Statesman.
We live in a society where corporations, spearheaded by the near-transcendental CEOs of today, are the primary culprits causing rapid climate change and the destruction of our ozone layer, while politicians take payouts to prevent legislation from restricting them. Back 20 years, I was more comfortable with this because even if the most powerful members of society allowed for our planet to be destroyed, at least they’d be burning alongside us peasants. But with the rapid development of privatized space flight, this is no longer the case.
No longer is space travel reserved for the best and brightest. Now anyone with enough money can buy a ticket to space. Jeff Bezos plans to deploy the first private space station within the next 10 years. Soon the billionaires will escape up to space and have sex with all the aliens while we are stuck down here standing around like a bunch of melvins with our thumbs up our asses.
In his infamous interview after returning to Earth, Bezos thanked his Amazon slaves and customers for funding the trip. This was met with mixed reception, but I saw it as a harrowing bit of foreshadowing. The private space race is a blatant display of the massive transfer of wealth from the American working class to the 1% elite; a whopping $50 trillion has shifted from the public into the stock portfolios of the richest Americans. But I’m a proud American patriot who loves capitalism, not a communist, so I have no issue with that; I just don’t want them escaping the planet without me.
If society’s elites have the option to abandon Earth instead of making sacrifices that will save the rest of us, they definitely won’t be picking the latter option. Now I don’t like this. If someone takes a dump on the floor, I expect them to clean it up, not run away and leave it for me to deal with. The same principle applies here. They were the ones who did the damage, so they are the ones responsible for cleaning it up.
This claim of being abandoned has been made before and has been met with criticism. An article titled “The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet” was written in the New York Times back in 2018. The author drew attention to the company Axiom who, at the time, had announced its attempts to create a commercial space station for Earth’s elite to live at.
A critic of the article wrote about how silly this prospect is because it requires thousands of people to operate the International Space Station properly and it is currently impossible to live comfortably in space. Conditions would be cramped and pooping without gravity sounds like a traumatic experience. And they make a really solid point I cannot think of a counterargument for. So I am just going to pretend like those facts don’t exist. Because nowadays we live in a society that is all about making our delusions into reality.
In order to keep the fear of God in our world leaders, I propose we build a giant space laser to shoot them down if they try to escape Earth without the masses. This will force the elite to decide to save us all instead of decisions that merely benefit those at the top. Without their asses being on the line, there will not be encouragement for those in power to decide to benefit all of us. Now they have to plan to save all of us, not just themselves or we’ll shoot them down with our giant space laser.
This will be an incredibly laborious task to fund without having the magnitude of a government or global corporation backing the project, but I think we can circumvent this issue by making a GoFundMe page and getting everyone to chip in. If you can afford Starbucks every day, you can afford a few bucks for the giant space laser. And it’s better if you can’t afford to go to Starbucks so often; the baristas have to deal with a massive line of cars every day because they have to write the equivalent of a short novel every time someone places a drink order.
If you feel attacked by this, you are part of the problem.
And you should boycott Starbucks for firing their employees for unionizing, anyway. Watching bleeding heart liberals continue to support Starbucks in droves just says so much about the society we live in.
Once this laser is built, the elite will once again have to worry about the condition of the Earth, since they cannot flee without us. If they try to leave us on this dystopian nightmare planet to go extinct, we will simply drag them back down into the burning depths of hell with us. That thought, personally, brings me a lot of comfort. And with your donation towards the giant space laser, you can receive the same feeling knowing that Elon Musk and Mark “Zucc” Zuckerberg will be trapped with the rest of us fighting over rats and polluted water to survive when the world does eventually end.