District 9 1/2
Originally published in 2013.
We share the same planet with them. Share oxygen. Space. We even look like them. More or less speak the same language. But they are not the same as us. Well, speaking for myself here, not the same as me, anyway. Maybe you are an alien. I can’t tell by just looking at you. That’s the insidious part. Unlike the prawns of District 9, clearly alien beings, you will have to do something to give yourself away.
You’d think by now nothing about human behavior would surprise me, let alone serve as a cause to put me into deep despair and cynicism and distrust. And it’s not the truly evil and brutal things that humans are capable of. Things like the Nazi Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge insanity, the Rwanda genocide, and a hundred or thousand other genocides, while incomprehensibly reprehensible, at least can be characterized as evil acts perpetrated by evil people in evil movements. In some fashion I can distance myself from them when I see them from the outside, see them for what they are. That’s not what I’m talking about.
What I am talking about springs from the same dark corner of the human psyche and soul as the greater evils of history, but it is something far more insidious, far more difficult to understand, intellectually or otherwise. Far more banal. I am talking (or in this case, writing) about those among us who, for all intents and purposes, appear to be good people, give every indication they are good people, have every reason to be good people. But by their words and their behavior and their intents, they are anything but good people. Their intent is to deceive through smiling faces and friendly words, their goal is to steal what they can from us — our good will, our peace of mind, our property, our time on this earth, even our love — ostensibly for no other purpose than for the sad and pathetic pleasure they derive by knowing that they can.
I feel their duplicity, and it stings. I feel their deceit, and it weighs heavy on the heart. I feel the bad will of their intent, and it inspires anger. I feel their betrayal, and it is the crime that cuts the deepest.
Unlike the prawns, who were corralled into a ghetto by humans, these other alien beings, these aliens who look like us, are free to move about. We are forced to live among them, compelled by default to dwell among these other beings, these malevolent aliens who pass for humans. We are the ones who must inoculate ourselves against their venom, put up walls and barbed fences, create our own corrugated-steel shanty enclave. Call it District 9 1/2.
I can name names, and I am tempted to do so. And I might yet. But to identify a few of these aliens is but a token gesture in a world increasingly overrun with them. They seem to reproduce and mutate almost daily. Though their mutations do not lead to pointy ears or prehensile tails, nor to prawn-like feelers nor calcite shells. Their mutations are, rather, further corruptions of the soul, further depravity of the spirit, further concentration of their toxin. We can only take our own precautions against them, put up our own cynical defenses, and hold close our own anti-venom. And hope we neither succumb to their evil nor acquire their DNA and turn into them.
We are truly living among aliens.
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© 2013, all rights reserved.