Commentary / Satire
Susan Dell appeared alongside Michael Dell and Donald Trump at an October 7 White House event about Trump Accounts.
Now, about an entirely imaginary alien arrival, because honestly, how much of our day would we even be willing to give that at this point?
Okay. Aliens. Do they have a plan for grocery prices, or is this another thing I have to deal with?
I understand that discovering life from another planet is supposed to change everything. There should be screaming. Somebody should drop a coffee cup in slow motion. We should all stand in the street looking up while a very serious scientist tries to explain what this means for humanity.
But if a spaceship landed tomorrow, I think an awful lot of us would watch for a minute and then ask whether we still had to go to work.
Because that’s the problem with a major world event. The regular shit keeps happening. The electricity bill doesn’t get emotionally overwhelmed and excuse itself. Dinner still has to exist. You could have absolute proof that we are not alone in the universe and still need to figure out what to do with the chicken you thawed.
And you know somebody would immediately make the aliens download an app. They’ve crossed distances our brains can barely comprehend, and now they need a password with a special character to park.
Welcome to Earth. You’ll need to verify your email.
The movies gave us very unrealistic expectations about this whole situation. An alien appears, the government puts together a team, and somebody with excellent hair takes charge. I suspect our version would involve six conflicting explanations, a fake video, and a person selling a course on how to communicate with them before lunch.
By dinner, there would be a sponsored post for alien-proof leggings. I don’t know what makes the leggings alien-proof. Neither would the person selling them.
The exhausting part is that we’d be expected to have an opinion immediately. Are the aliens good? Are they bad? Have you read what their leader posted eight hundred years ago? Why haven’t you put anything about the invasion on your story?
Can they give us a minute? They just got here. Let them find the bathroom.
Personally, in this completely fictional scenario, I would like to hear the aliens out. They managed interstellar travel. That suggests somebody, somewhere, finished a project. Maybe they have ideas. Maybe they could look at why a bag of groceries can feel like a financial decision that should involve another adult.
If their whole plan is to stand behind a podium and tell us how great everything is going, however, they can get right back in the spaceship. We have plenty of that here.
This is where the Men in Black part gets interesting to me. Forget the secret headquarters. Let’s discuss the little memory-erasing gadget.
Could we borrow that for the news? Very selectively, obviously. I’d like to retain my passwords and the ability to drive. But a few of the headlines currently taking up space in my brain could absolutely go. We could clear out enough room to remember why we walked into the kitchen.
I realize an alien invasion should probably rank higher on the list of things to worry about. It feels disrespectful to the aliens, frankly. They’d have traveled all that way expecting a proper reaction, and we’d be asking if they validated parking.
But that’s where I am with 2026. If a little green guy steps off a spaceship tomorrow, I’m going to need him to be useful.
Grab a cart, buddy. We’re going to the grocery store, and you’re going to explain this bullshit to me.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration of an imaginary scene.
