Monday, July 8, 2013

What's More Important?

The sun simply went out.
"Pfffftttt" echoed through the vast emptiness.
For the next 8.3 minutes seven billion people dreamed, played, helped, harmed, and in general thought the sun was there for them. As the last of the suns warming rays of energy sped toward earth, they also sped in a billion different directions, warming and illuminating everything in their path without preference.
     On a hot day in the middle of nowhere a sweaty, red-faced human spoke ill of the sun, saying, "Good God but I hate these hot sunny days." And they truly hated the sun, many times having wished to live in Alaska or some other miserably cold place, and as they voiced their dislike of the sun now, it was not without irony, foreshadowing or some other literary device that a hint was given as to what may come their way. In an ill-fated attempt to prove the point they also said, " I would give my right testicle to be rid of this heat!" As luck would have it, they would not need to part with a testicle.
     Just a few minutes left now, and an enormous pile topped by Pythagoras and Einstein but also containing Hippocrates, Socrates and Hitler stole the last few beams of the suns energy from a much smaller pile topped by Mother Theresa and Gandhi. In fact, they were the only two in the pile. But where is Lincoln you might ask. Ah, there he his, just beneath Hitler in the big pile; the preservation of the union wasn't really a humanitarian act at all, because he would have made the small pile if his motives had been pure. But then his final moments in posterity would have been spent in the cold and lonely small pile, and at least the big pile would be warm and well illuminated until the end.
     Suddenly a mournful wail let out from the top of the big pile, " But I didn't know!"
     "You knew Einstein," said to the actual memory of Einstein and not to derogatorily malign someone who had done something stupid. "You knew..." Truman repeated, trailing off as the realization set in that he too had known.
     The emphatic punctuation of the reverberating "Pffffttt" never made it through space and its lack of substance, but Einstein and a few others in the big pile knew it must have been present when the sun went out. For mother Theresa and Gandhi, the world just suddenly went dark, perhaps mercifully.
     "It's so peaceful," Gandhi said to Mother Theresa.
     "Ohhhhh crap!" Was all that Hitler could manage.