To:  The Human Will-Be’s of the Future

From:  The Human Used-To-Be’s of the Past

Date:  Summer, 2019

Re:  Restoring Sanity

Fellow travelers,

Years ago, an ambitious princess acquired plans to a powerful battle station which had been constructed by a tyrannical empire.  Upon capturing those plans, the princess endeavored to destroy the devastating weapon.  She entrusted the plans with a diminutive, non-gender specific personal assistant and charged them with seeking out the necessary resources who could assist in completing the project at hand.

The weapon was eventually destroyed by the very resources the princess had sought out.

If you’re reading this, then you’ve received a similar message from that princess.  Our part of the mission has failed, so we now look to you to complete the objective. 

It’s become painfully obvious to us that we’ve engaged in a spate of bad decision making, the results of which have created consequences the likes of which we failed to ever consider in the first place.

It all started with a paradigm shift brought on by our need to save our planet and the human race from ourselves.  We changed policies and procedures.  We put regulations and restrictions in place.  We passed legislation.  We normalized our deviancies.  We lowered the bar on the lowest common denominator and made it a goal instead of something to avoid.

In the process, we stopped prosecuting certain crimes and have forgiven those same crimes which had been previously committed.  We’ve extended the rights of the mentally ill to continue to be a liability to themselves and others.  We’ve enjoined fast food organizations from determining the contents of their kids meals.  In our war on plastics and what they were doing to sea turtles, we’ve banned single use grocery bags and plastic straws.  We’re now making a move to ban plastic bottles from airports.  

Now, as we bear witness to the wretched fruits of our labor, we’ve become painfully aware that our ill-conceived efforts to put humanity on the correct path have gone horribly awry.  We no longer use the tools at our disposal to identify and treat the mentally ill among us.  Instead, we allow them to languish in the streets which are infested with the debris, filth, and waste. 

In an age where our entertainment industry continues to reboot stories from the past in order to serve up a modernized version of a once classic tale, our updated approach to problem solving has resurrected that classic from the middle ages known as typhus.

As these issues have developed over the last few years, a blue ribbon panel appointed by our well intentioned elected officials met a few times to workshop a few potential solutions.  After sending out for lunch a few times and deliberating the issue for a few hours, they identified a cause and solution.

It wasn’t the excessive regulation.

It wasn’t our refusal to take responsibility for the well-being of those who couldn’t do it for themselves.

It was the turtles.

It turns out their shells give off an odorless gas which can have deleterious effects on the human psyche.  Someone who’s been exposed to these fumes exhibits symptoms of auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions.   

Since these symptoms are shared with those displayed by the mentally ill, we didn’t realize there was an external threat.

The blue ribbon panel concluded that a program of placing a plethora of plastic straws in the sea in perpetuity was needed to keep the turtle herds and their toxic fume exuding shells at levels that will allow the human race to manage their insanity quotient more practically.

This is where you come in.

We’re out of straws.

We banned them to save the turtles.

We put all of the plastic straw manufacturers out of business to save the turtles. 

We fire bombed their factories to save the turtles.

We dragged their executives out of their warm beds in the middle of the night, subjected them to a kangaroo court, and put them up against the wall, all to save the turtles.

We expect that your turtle herds are thriving.

We expect that in our future and your present, the instances of mental illness have increased from what it is now.  This is because we saved the turtles when we should have continued to manage their numbers with plastic straws.

If you have any hope of getting past the epidemic that we failed to stop, you need to get some straws into the ocean.

We expect that in our future and your present, plastic reserves are either insufficient or non-existent.  The good news is that straws constructed of other materials will have similar impacts on the sea turtles.

Assuming you still have the necessary material access, we implore you to begin assembling battle tested, metal straws so that they can be deployed in a manner that will help you capture a level of sanity you have probably never known. 

Peace and courage.