AN APOLOGY TO MAGA FROM THE UNIVERSE: “SORRY FOR BEING SO HARD”
Dear MAGA,
I don’t normally trouble myself with local matters. After all, the great, great, great etc. majority of what goes on within my purview, if interesting to those with a sense of wonder, doesn’t deviate from the normal course of events. Matter and energy do what they do, and things are generally business as usual with me. But sometimes little things blip out of the cosmos’ humming gears that tickle my funny bone, and I find it amusing to respond. (I mean “funny bone” in a figurative sense: all the bones within my boundaries represent a nanospeck of me, so if one or more were tickled, I doubt I would notice.)
To get straight to the matter: while I’ve always found the resistance to complexity of the great majority of your species puzzling, I’m struck by the lengths to which you in particular have gone to avoid it of late. Mostly it amuses me. But I’m not wholly without feelings (though hearts, like bones, are virtually absent in me), and there’s something, I don’t know…almost touching about your will-to-infancy. While I don’t normally do this, then, I want to apologize for being so hard.
First off, I’m sorry for something that seems to vex you with particular force: diversity, equity, and inclusion. I agree that equity is a fantasy, and will be happy to introduce anyone who feels otherwise to the black hole nearest them. Nonetheless, I find a compelling logic in this formulation. Diversity, I admit, is inefficient. The gears would hum more smoothly still if energy and matter had agreed from the get go to curtail the exuberance of their collaboration. I myself sometimes pine for the simplicity of the nanoseconds after the Big Bang. But there’s nothing for it, diversity is hardwired into me — figuratively again, wires like hearts and bones etc. — and thus into everything in me, including your species.
That being the case, I’ve always thought (to the extent that I’ve bothered giving it a thought) that the sensible thing to do, the thing that would minimally disrupt the cosmic gear-hum, would be to accept this state of affairs and accommodate yourselves to it. That is to say, to embrace inclusion. I admit that inclusion is hard, though. Like, after all, likes like. Agreeing to live, work, and pee with unlike takes effort, and inertia is a powerful drug. So I’m sorry that living with the rest of your species, even in your drug-addled state, is so hard.
By the by, I quite agree with your disdain for what you call wokeness. The cosmos would run a little more smoothly if all sentient beings would just go to sleep and not wake up.
Before moving on, I’d like to touch on one particular aspect of your antipathy to DEI (as you abbreviate it to conserve the energy required to think about what it means) that I find especially puzzling in its outsized virulence. There’s a small percentage of your species that comes to consciousness at some point in their lives, often when they’re very young, that some of their physical features don’t align with who they know themselves to be. This little evolutionary hiccup appears to represent for many of you something like a threat to the order of the universe. Speaking as the universe *ahem*, I assure you it’s not. I am of course aware of your species’ practice of scapegoating (since it too is a part of me), and have no objection on principle to the practice. Billions of suns are being swallowed by black holes across me as I write this. Matter and energy do what they do. Still, I do wonder why you’ve singled out this small group if your goal is to send everyone to bed, since you seem to be the only ones these fellow members of your species are keeping up at night. Might I suggest targeting some other group, for example white male gun owners? They cause far more harm, and provoke far more sleeplessness overall.
Just a thought.
Moving on to another thing that seems to upset you bigly: the change in your planet’s climate. It’s true that, considered on what you would call a cosmic timescale, your climate has vacillated wildly between temperate zones at the two poles and a global ice age that annihilated almost all life on the planet — the so-called “snowball Earth.” Considered in this light, the current warming of your planet is just another iteration of the constant flux that characterizes me. What I find curious is your hostility to the phenomenon, and your desire that no one even talk about it, let alone try to do anything to mitigate its effects (since as your scientific community has documented, your actions have contributed to it).
My experience of the life forms within my purview is that they usually do what they do without considering the effects of their actions on anything beyond themselves, and pay a price for their actions only when those actions throw their environment out of balance. In this case, though, members of your own species are sounding the alarm in advance of this systemic slap-back. Nevertheless, you persist in your hostility to their warnings. At first, I considered that perhaps you represent an anomalous subset of your species for which the death drive is stronger than the life drive. But while I haven’t entirely abandoned that hypothesis given your aforementioned embrace of mass murderers over trans people, I’m now more inclined to attribute it to a different motive: your resentment that climate science, like gender, and like loving your neighbors, is hard.
Again, I’m sorry for this. If I had my way, things would be simpler. But I, like you and everything else in me, am wired to be what I am. My workings are complex. Existence in me is complex. I was simple only when I was an explosion of everything; and while it’s fine for me to pine for those nanoseconds every once in a while, I’m afraid you would find them inhospitable in the extreme.
There are other things I could apologize for, many of them spelled out in your Project 2025 document, which incidentally struck me as a sort of letter to Santa if he were in the business of answering grievances instead of the wishes of children — perhaps I should say other children? But I don’t want to overtax your attention span. Please, then, accept my apology for being what I am, and for your being what you are.
And to anyone else reading this, please accept my apology for MAGA being what it is. As I said, for better and worse, matter and energy do what they do.
Sincerely,
The Universe
