JUNE 11, 2022 – Blinking but without humming or saying a word, the alien rose from the table and gracefully exited through the central screen panel of the porch. It then soared to the top of a neighbor’s maple tree and rested there, pulsating, for several minutes before retracing its course back to the tabletop.
“What’s your worst stuff?”
I was taken aback. The alien’s teardrop (if that’s truly what it was, born of emotion) over Helen Keller’s reaction to “hearing” Beethoven and the thing’s sudden departure for the treetop had given me hope that our “best stuff” had struck a responsive chord. But now the alien returned to ask bluntly about our “worst stuff.”
The question was infinitely more problematic than the one seeking to know our “best stuff.” If I piled it on—what, the extermination of six million Jews? Thousands of nuclear warheads? Slavery across all continents over thousands of years? Genocide by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia? More privately-owned firearms than there are people in a nation with a population of 330 million? Wrecking our planet by our pollution?—I risked a significant increase in the probability the alien would decide to wreck us. Yet, the alien was way too savvy for me to soft-pedal our “worst stuff.”
As in assembling an exposition of our “best stuff,” I needed time to organize some thoughts regarding the bad. Time to refill the lemonade pitcher.
As I cut, squeezed, tasted, sweetened another pitcher of liquid refreshment as inefficiently as I possibly could, I pondered the downsides of humanity. In the current era, when combative, shriekingly disturbing news reports are fueling our feeds 24/7, there’s plenty of “worst stuff” from which to choose. From a broader, historical perspective, however, the question becomes more philosophical, much as the “best stuff” question does. Medieval warfare, nuclear weapons, gas chambers, concentration camps, suicide bombers, a gun culture in which a disturbed 18-year old can and does haul off and kill innocent school children . . . any of these or a thousand other despicable features of humanity would give the wrong impression; would distort the alien’s view of humanity’s complicated character. If I stuck with generalizations about our “worst stuff,” something broadly biblical, I could avoid being sucked into the swamp of specific examples of it.
I stirred the lemonade more than was needed, took a deep breath and returned to the porch.
“Given that you even asked about our worst stuff, and given your level of discernment, you know full well by now that we humans are, in fact, capable of a good deal of ‘bad stuff.’ What’s our worst bad stuff is a difficult question—I’ll be perfectly honest: we have so much bad stuff, I’d have to apply considerable effort to decide on the best example of our worst.”
I waited a beat, took a deep breath, and continued. “My honest, considered response is this: myopia. That’s our worst stuff.”
“Myopia? What kind of answer is that?”
Actually, I’d surprised myself with it. “Myopia” hadn’t even lurked in the background of my thoughts while I’d been making the lemonade. It just popped into my head a nano-second before I said it. I’d intended to start with the seven deadly sins and go from there. But out of nowhere impulsivity flashed—like a squirrel darting across the road in front of speeding car. (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
