- Omid-X to Esperan-M (his mother) -
My dearest lifegiver, it has been some time since I have written you last, but rest assured, my decision to stay with my mission on Earth is definitive, and I am recovering from my depression. And don’t worry, I am well-fed.
Today I want to tell you a story that I heard last night in a restaurant in the city of Montreal, in Canada (The same country that has Vancouver as a city also). As I was eating dinner, and scanning the earthlings for some insight into their culinary and eating habits, I heard this man telling his audience (his friends and family) how he thought that the old ways of parents punishing their children for being naughty was better than today’s.
He was saying that in the old days parents just hit their kids when they did naughty things. Sometimes it was just a tap on the back, sometimes a bit more serious. There were even instances of hitting the kids with a belt. But generally, most parents just hit once, and when the kids showed remorse by crying, they stopped and the deal was over. As he said, «the punishment was quickly over and done with.»
These days, he said, they have turned punishment into an entire ritual: grounding the kid, depriving him/her of activities or gadgets and objects, forcing her/him into ‘hard labor’ such as doing chores around the house, and on and on. All these to comply with various laws enacted to protect children from abuse. But he was saying that although these methods do not look as dramatic and harsh as hitting, they have the same or even more harm. The pain and punishment is actually unending.
As I was listening to him, I don’t know why, but I got thinking about the trend that started on our planet some three generations ago, and lasted until the Great Implosion. The one in which countries stopped going to war with each other all the time, because the few powerful ones managed to use sanctions and embargos against whomever they considered to be on the wrong side (naughty).
I recall you told me once, when I was a young boy, this power led those few powerful nations to develop an arrogant entitlement attitude, which eventually led to the Great Implosion that our planet is still trying to recover from.
Now, I am not sure if Earth is going or will ever go that way, but sometimes I feel it is perhaps time to contact my employers and ask them either to increase my compensation or re-assign me to another planet and another mission. I consider what I am doing here and enduring to be hardship, and I am thus entitled to additional hardship pay supplements.
From Montreal, Québec, Canada - 21 June, 2023 (Earth)