The Most Powerful Nation On Earth

The Most Powerful Nation on Earth

There is no way of telling how many years have passed since the war ended. It feels like an eternity. The entire face of the world changed on the day the freedom fighters fell to the opposition. We thought we were smarter, stronger than our enemies. We were wrong. Like vultures upon weak prey, they descended at the first falter, in a moment of --

No, that's not how it really happened. The freedom fighters - if you could call them that - were arrogant. Ignorant, too. There was no such thing as freedom, even then. The fighting began in retaliation to a blow from one of our enemies during a lethargic administration. We had become decadent - in an age of rising prices and declining money, we squandered what we had on anything we could.

Clothes, cars, and gadgets galore - we were the richest poor nation in the world. Knowing this, our leaders went the extra step to ensure our appearance as omniscient and omnipotent by sticking their noses into everyone else's business. That's how we got ourselves into trouble. When we were good and busy with other people's problems, that's when they attacked us. We were so drunk with power and immersed in our own decadence that we never even saw it coming.

And when the attacks came, we were a nation too stunned to react. Who would dare confront The Most Powerful Nation On Earth? After the shock wore off, anger set in, and our leaders retaliated. Only they got it wrong. Well, not exactly. They may have invaded the wrong country, but they knew exactly what they were doing.

After a while, the anger subsided and was replaced with avarice and self-righteousness. We continued to invade country after country, deposing leader after leader, until we had succeeded in alienating ourselves from everyone else in the entire universe. And then, finally, the world imploded.

That was seventy years ago, by our best approximation - there is no longer any such thing as precise time. For that short amount of time, we had enjoyed having control of the universe - after all, we seemed to be the only ones out there in the middle of space, so logically, he who controls the planet controls the universe.

Unfortunately, our leaders didn't take into account the weight of all this new power. Like children on a seesaw, the balance had gone up and down, repeated highs and lows for centuries, until our leaders came along. They carried weights on their side of the seesaw, just plopped right down and threw off the child at the other end, and the balance of all the cosmic forces went with it. Karma's a bitch.

Stars exploded, the moon cracked in half, and the earth fell out of orbit. Like a helium balloon a set "free" at a carnival, our planet now floats aimlessly, silently along in outer space. It's become the ultimate example of chaos theory. Unfortunately for us, for everyone really, no one had really perfected space travel up to this point - most of our funding had gone to creating armories for endless wars. They are useless to us now.

I suppose you could say that we're all on one giant space ship, floating on one giant raft throughout the sea of the universe, but this is really of no use to us now. During the war, even though (and especially because) we lacked the money for better space ships and hadn't even explored our alternative living possibilities, there was a lot of talk about transplant communities.

Well, we've certainly moved, but we're still more like foreign invaders than anything else, maybe more so now than ever, intruding into unknown corners of space. That's all there is left to intrude, anyhow. Everything else has exploded or imploded or simply burned up, and we are left a sad, wandering nomad, the last cosmic Bedouin.

And that's how it really happened. I don't know if anyone will ever hear this, considering there seems to be nothing and no one left now, but I talk nonetheless. It's the only way to break the suffocating silence.