A big, blazing star shows up in the sky,
One night,
Two nights,
By the third night… we’ve all got thoughts, dude.
The end is upon us!
Elders proclaim from pulpits the world over, relieved to finally be right on this one.
Believers everywhere, Orthodox and Otherwise, make frantic amends with their gods.
It’s easier than making nice with each other, right?
They’ve known all their lives, faithfully or fearfully, that their day of divine judgment and reckoning would find them.
In response, podcast booths and meme armies on all the lesser-known social media platforms light up, screaming into the Ether about those sheeple over there, believe it’s a sign their Lord’s come to get them, when clearly it’s a satellite fire, from the secret space war between the Batshit Billionaire and That Asian Country over Venn Diagrams of Influence over the World. You haven’t heard of it, of course, because the Mainstream Media, something, something, ya gotta check out that comedian’s last 3-hour podcast… the one with all the pretty words… he says it so much better.
The third camp is pissed at the first two for making so much noise. Jeez, you’d think none of them had seen a giant blaze in the sky before! Of course, it’s just a spy tool, and everybody’s using them.
Hey, they whisper, How has no one said it's Aliens yet?
And then a weary traveler walks onto the scene, back from the line where West meets East, the frosty part, no magic about it, where he worked as a television cameraman. He says,
Look, I was there when this all started, and the blazing fire in the sky, it’s a sort of giant atmospheric spotlight, a satellite, mostly benign, masterminded by the enemy we refuse to acknowledge, just to put us at each others’ throats. We shouldn’t let them win.
But the rest of the crowd, the first three groups, they don’t buy it. They throw all the pretty words that they’ve been taught, to try to sway the Traveler.
That’s just a hoax, spread by Neolib Neocons, to invent enemies where there aren’t any!
Seriously, you think these people have nothing better to do than provoke us? They don’t even speak English.
What about when we’ve done it elsewhere?
And when they can’t sway him to abandon his conscience, they drag him through the mud, and banish him from their circles, and pat themselves on the back for working together, shutting down a heretic on sight.
Imagine believing an enemy would put that much work into ridiculing us!, They say.
I know! It’s almost as ridiculous as believing it's Judgment Day!
Wait… what…?
…and as that uneasy alliance shatters back into bitter rivalry and a mutual disdain as sharp as a better cheese, the Traveler, in his exile, watches the Editor-in-Chief of the Our Enemy Today Media Network, on the evening news show, as she recites, with perfect diction,
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
She does it just to prove she can.
She laughs at those who can’t.
She laughs at us, and at the Devil who has yet to string her up.
And then she turns the satellite spotlight off, and all is dark again.