Mass Homicide

 

(We'll all be dead soon.)

Yesterday, I read a poem by Anne Bradstreet with my high-school class. Anne was a Puritan woman who lived in Massachusetts back in the seventeenth century. She had to look after eight children while maintaining her household. Anyway, the name of the poem is An Author to Her Book. Bradstreet is certainly not as talented as Lord Byron, but her work is both charming and historically interesting, nevertheless.

One of my students raised her hand. “The Japanese and Koreans are no longer having children. They’re too busy working.”

I said, “Anne worked, too. She helped her husband, looked after her kids, and wrote verse on the side.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call that a real job.”

I smiled at her. “I’m not sure what the early colonists actually did for a living. Yet keeping a clean house certainly isn’t easy. Trust me. I learned that from bitter experience.”

One boy said, “They probably hunted and fished a lot. You had to find food on a daily basis, or you’d starve to death.”

I said, “They grew vegetables, too. I lived in New England until I was sixteen. The farmland is not too shabby.”

He said, “Isn’t it too cold to grow much?”

I said, “I froze my hump to the bone every winter. Yet we had a vegetable garden in our backyard. It produced corn and squash and pumpkins. The stuff simply sprouted right from the ground like there was no tomorrow.”

Another girl joined the conversation. “I wouldn’t want to have eight children. It would destroy my body. One’s enough.”

I shook my head. “One isn’t enough. If every family only produced a single infant, then the world population would dwindle down to practically nothing after a mere four generations.”

She said, “It would be good for the environment. We are the dirtiest creatures who inhabit the earth.”

“We’re pretty filthy. That’s for sure. But the earth without humans doesn’t sound all that great to me.”

Later in the day, I watched a video on Rumble featuring Dan Bongino. There’s an article in Time Magazine where a famous scientist tells the world that our extinction by artificial intelligence is one-hundred percent certain. This man claims that it’s already too late. The dice have been cast, and we’ll all be wiped out within the next ten years. Dan was very nonplussed by this dire news, but it slid off my back like water from a duck’s ass. After all, what the fuck can I do about it? I just hope that my robot overlord exterminates me in a painless fashion. Suffering isn’t my forte.

I eventually got home at 6 p.m. and cracked open a can of beer. Then I gave Rice-Boy Larry his weekly allowance of thirty dollars.

He said, “Thanks, Dad.”

“Don’t mention it. But let me have twenty minutes before cooking supper. My tootsies are crying out in pain.”

“Are you OK?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. According to the medical community, we’ll all be slaughtered by artificial intelligence in about a decade or so.”

“That’s not good.”

“No, it certainly isn’t. Yet what’s a boy to do?”

I finally got back to my feet and prepared fried rice and eggs for dinner. The meal was OK. We devoured every last bite.

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