Australia Day

Picture this.

The earth in 2011 is invaded by aliens from planet Zarb.

They come down in their spaceships and start treating the earth as if they own it, so they can live out their lives comfortably as they did in Zarb. The main job in the society is sorting rocks by colour and size. It’s a huge operation, and those who sort the fastest and best are rewarded with a food that tastes a bit like a moldy cupcake. Status and wealth is indicated by how many moldy cupcake things you can stockpile and lavish upon your friends.

They spend the first hundred years or so here being total jerks to us, mainly because they don’t consider us to be an intelligent species because of our inability to sort rocks the way they like, and our confusion about the cupcake system. Eventually though they start to be a bit nicer, some of them recognise that we have our own culture and form of intelligence. They let us join them in their important sorting of rocks, and sometimes they give us more cupcakes than they give to their own, just as a token of apology for the years of mistreatment. Freedom! Yes.

Unfortunately though, we’re still all terrible at the rocks thing, and our respect for moldy cupcakes has increased only marginally in two hundred years. We could try to go back to our old ways, but all the buildings where we used to live and the companies we used to work in are gone. Well this pretty much sucks, so we complain about it to the Zarbians. But they are fed up with us being so lazy and not taking the rock-sorting mission seriously.

“Why can’t you make something of yourselves?”

Make something of yourselves.

Ok.