The one thing we can agree on
This was a hard goddamn piece to write. I hope you’ll appreciate the many days of dismal thoughts and grotesque visuals that went into it. May it impress upon you an iota of the insane predicament that is our everyday fucking life.
This is missive: critical #2: The one thing we can agree on.
Like so many of the really shitty things in life, it’ll be announced by a text message. If it even mentions a time it’ll be something like 15 minutes. We’ll look at each other quizzically, maybe we’ll waste a minute or two awkwardly trying to be stoic or looking for others of the ‘This is a joke, right?’ persuasion, but it’ll settle in. Someone’s finally gone and done it, and we won’t be able to help ourselves, the first thing we’ll do is yell at our phones for a bit.
No matter what you might think, it doesn’t really matter where you go from there.
The flash strips off any exposed skin. For those looking into it, it will be the last thing they see. For those fortunate enough to be within a Tuesday morning power walk of the source, neither of these things will register. They’re space dust before their neurons could even get the memo out. For the millions of suckers further out, within a hundred miles, say: Hooo boy…
It’s pretty fucking awesome for a few seconds there, I’ll admit. If you’re not blind you’re gazing up into a tower of flame the size of several city blocks. Clouds in the sky are blown out like a candle, replaced with a mushroom cloud / lightning storm that spans the horizon. Anything electrical fizzes, sparks, or bursts into flame, but you barely even notice ’cause you’re watching rows of skyscrapers get snapped like matchsticks and sucked into the fucking stratosphere. If you’re not in one of them you’re getting a taste of what the inside of an airfryer might feel like, for a second or two at least, before the fireball, reaching 3 miles into the sky, swallows everything.
That’s when the real fires start. Fires the size of mountains. Fires so bright you can see them from a thousand miles away. Fires so hot they generate their own hurricanes, with winds fast enough to rip the concrete from the melting bones of buildings. Within minutes the fires spread a hundred miles out. Millions of humans incinerated, finally becoming one with their city, forming a giant column of ash that reaches into the stratosphere, ready to choke the world on guilt for decades to come.
The fires might reach a hundred miles out but the fun doesn’t stop there. The column of ash blots out the sun over whole countries at a time. Better get used to that. Carried by super-heated storms, the noxious fumes released from burning all the shit we surrounded ourselves with will spread over hundreds of miles, choking, burning, and blinding anything in their path. Lethally radioactive toxic black rain starts pouring down, melting anything it lands on. Better get used to that too.
God fucking help you if you go to a hospital during any of this. The shit you’ll see there in the last agonizing hours of your life, watching the city’s horrors paraded before you and the piles of corpses pouring in, often literally, would be a Clive Barker movie in smellovision.
Modern medicine might be amazing, but if you really think there’s some high tech miracle that could treat a few million people in various stages of melting, while everything is either on fire or radioactive, with no power, no staff, no medicine, and no way of addressing even one of those problems, you’re exactly the kind of delusional moron I’m writing this piece for.
…
Some part of you twitched at that. We’ve all got some of that delusional moron in us, prattling excuses and platitudes. Maybe it won’t be that bad? Maybe your city isn’t important enough to be targeted? Maybe you’re in the middle of nowhere? Maybe you’ve prepared for this?
Maybe you weren’t paying attention when I said it doesn’t really matter where you go from here? You see, this was One. Fucking. Warhead.
There’s 10,214 more, thousands ready to launch at a moment’s notice, or at least they were. They’re in the air now.
Take a moment here, if you will. Open Google Maps and scroll around for a bit. Count the cities you scroll over. Count to fifty. Now count to ten fucking thousand.
Back? So, if even handful of these go off the atmosphere is mostly ash within a week. The world goes dark and temperatures drop by about 50°c. For all intents and purposes nothing will grow anywhere on earth for years. The oceans will be too acidic to support life. The sun won’t be seen for decades. Tell me, you in your submarines and you in your shelters: how many breaths will you spend being proud or grateful?
…
Now, all of that checks out, but if maintaining your delusions will finally make you Google something you read online, by all means go for it! You’re not gonna like what you find.
This, in a nutshell, is the gun that every single human has pointed at their head, every minute of every day of their lives, through no choice or fault of their own.
So to all you angry, shouting, morons, forever at each other’s throats over dick-waving political soap opera stars — to all you miserable assholes desperately fucking each other over for the ones and zeroes you’ve convinced yourselves represent not just money, but worth — to everyone taking life one Game of Thrones episode at a time, eyes closed and fingers crossed — and above all, to all you motherfuckers who’ve ever believed in something enough you’d end someone’s life over it — let me ask you the following:
After reading the above, do you really think that any of what you read would end well for you, your family, your friends, your country, or your faith?
I didn’t fucking think so. Now, is it safe to say it’s glaringly obvious that there is indeed one thing we can all agree on, and that it’s about time we all take a deep breath and put the fucking gun down?
Good. With that settled, here’s a thought. I know this might sound a little out there, but bear with me — after all, it’s only the nuclear fucking apocalypse we’re talking about here: Let’s ignore all the other shit for just a minute. Let’s put aside the years of history that most of us don’t even know about and none of us had any say in, and let’s make it clear to any motherfucker with any power at all that this happens before anything else can happen.
There are billions of us watching. If they won’t make it happen, we’ll find someone who will. There is nothing they could say or do to us that could change our mind, because there is literally nothing they could do that could be worse.
