Citizens of Planet Zob - Unite against this grave injustice!

As  it's #Earthday.....

 Are you a citizen of Planet Zob? If the answer is no, you may wonder what this is all about. You were clearly interested enough to read up to here to find out what the grave injustice was. This means one of three things. The first is that you have an interest in the extra-terrestial, the second is that you care about injustice or the third is that you are a malignant soul who is hoping this is a sign that my mental health has deteriorated and I am living in a fantasy world. 

You may be interested to know that I have an interest in all three things. I am fascinated by the concept of extra terrestial life. This started with an obsession with 60's / 70's Sci fi series such as Dr Who and UFO. I also have a mild obsession with comics, probably due to the fact that I'm dyslexic and I find comics and graphic novels more palatable than books. I went through a phase of collecting all manner of British Sci Fi publications. One of the best was a serialisation of the Jeff Hawke comic from the Daily Express in the 60's and 70's. One of the premise's that the series operated under was that humanity was a fairly unsophisticated race and that the aliens who came into contact with Hawke were often grotesque in appearance, but far more intelligent, kindly and benevolent than us. Unlike the Daleks and the Aliens in UFO, they were not out to enslave or murder us.  As Wikipedia notes 

"The plots of Jeff Hawke turned around the seemingly endless, baroque diversity of aliens and their worlds, their contacts with humans, and the ability of Hawke and his friends to manage relationships with so many different entities. The subtle wit of Patterson made the creatures and the plots revolving around them as fascinating as they were amusing, whereas the highly expressive Jordan drawing style fully captured the strangeness of the various worlds and creatures. The aliens were almost always much more technologically advanced and wise than humans, and often the plots were highly critical of various "primitive" aspects of the human race, like pollution."

Of course we have no idea whether there really are aliens, whether they would be belevolent as predicted by Sydney Jordan or malevolent as predicted by UFO and Dr Who. I have been thinking about this with the footage of the Mars helicopter this week, this blog would have appeared earlier had the ESL story not got in the way. If, as seems very unlikely, there are Martians, and they are keeping an eye on the rover and the helicopter, it is worth bearing in mind that we are the intrusive aliens to them. If they were a benelovent peaceful race, what would they make of us? If they are monitoring our news channels, I'd be very wary if I were them. The news this week of the conviction of the killer of George Floyd demonstrates how we treat people with even minor differences in skin pigmentation. For an alien who we may see as grotesque, it does not bode well.

I am intrigued that whenever I read any MOD/Pentagon commentary in regards to UFO's and Aliens, it is always discussed in terms of threat. There is never any discussion of the opportunity for advancement. If just one UFO from the tens of thousands of reports is really from another world, it means that there is life out there which has developed technology far beyond our own. By definition, should they wish to pose a threat, it would be fairly significant. If, however they are simply curious, I can't say I would blame them from keeping their distance.

As to injustice, the George Floyd case has thrown this into sharp contrast. I wonder what our casual benevolent alien would make of it all. Assuming they were signed up to the concepts of rule and law and justice, I can only assume they'd find us very barbaric and primitive in our application of law, given that under the US constitution Mr Floyd had the same rights and protections as anyone else.  I suspect that they'd be even more baffled by our nationalistic view of covid. If you look at the BBC website, there are two stories. One is that covid is no longer the biggest killer in the UK, which is great news. What is not such great news is that India, a country with a Space program of its own, had over 300,000 new cases of covid. For us, this is  a major threat. The more people globally that have covid, the more likely that there will be a mutation. A vaccine resistant mutation would put us right back to the start. When you think about it logically, universal justice, be it over vaccinations or human rights is enlightened self interest. Ensuring access to vaccines for poor nations is the best way of stopping mutations. Ensuring that Police forces act fairly is also in our interest, as when people feel disenfranchised and discriminated against by the system, they see no reason to follow the law. This puts us all at risk. back in 2012, we had riots in our own cities following the death of a Black citizen in a Police Station. We are always far closer to complete anarchy than we realise. What keeps it at bay is when people feel that they will be treated fairly by the system.

Which leads nicely onto the final topic I raised. That of mental health. This is a very misunderstood issue. I had serious issues as a teenager when I was 12/13, enough to be referred to a pediatrician and to be put on Vallium. I had always thought I was depressed, but having dug more deeply and found that the problem was anxiety, which makes a hell of a lot more sense. I suspect that I'd suffered PTSD when I was around eight and my mother nearly died of stomach cancer. We had a period of six months where she had several operations and it was very touch and go .Daily visits to see her looking awful, wired up to machines and being fed by drips. Children are extremely sensitive and in hindsight it is clear that it had a terrible effect on me. By the time my mother was fully recovered and given the all clear, I was a teenager. In this period, my siblings had left home and my parents had decided to concentrate on enjoying themselves. I reacted by immersing myself in a fantasy world, driven by the comics I loved, which were the only thing I really enjoyed reading. 

The core of my problems, were that I wanted to emerse myself in a fantasy world to escape the day to day stress that life had become. My life at home was one where getting dinner was about the extent of what my Parents managed. As a dyslexic, school was a nightmare, a daily exercise in humiliation and fear. The one escape was the friends in my road, who probably pulled me through without even realising. My Dad built me a shed in the garden that was my space. I was lucky. We'd sit down there, on chairs recovered from wrecks at his car business and feel safe. 

I was thinking about this and the George Floyd situation. The defence team made great play of Floyd's drug usage, claiming he was about to keel over and drop dead anyway. I can't help but wonder what demons in George Floyds life lead him down the path of drug usage. A society without justice, a society where there are no even breaks. A society where the Police are not the number you call when you are in trouble. A society where the colour of your skin defines the quality of your justice. 

So you might wonder, what is this long, rambling blog actually trying to say? Well as I mentioned above, I have marvelled that as a race, we can put a helicopter and a rover on another planet. I've also mused on what the occupants, if they exist, of that planet may make of us and the way we conduct our business. I've discussed how real, stressful events in my own life affected me and identified that, difficult as they were, many people have far more difficult and unresolvable situations, in circumstances where the authorities simply add to the stress rather than offer a way out. I talked about how we might perceive that which is alien to us. How the makers of films portray that which we percieve as alien to us as dastardly and us as heroic. But what really is alien? 

Have you ever, for one second wondered, whether the equivalent of David Attenborough of Planet Zob might have made a documentary about human beings? Maybe all of these UFO's were just the film crew coming to do a 'fly on the wall' documentary. If such a being/person exists, how do you think we'd come across? If such a thing does exist, I'd love to see it, with suitable subtitles. I suspect it may be a very difficult thing for us to watch. I do hope that the Zob Attenborough manages to identify a few redeeming features. I suspect that our portrayal of them via Hollywood Blockbusters is a grave injustice. I just hope their documentary makers don't do a similar hatchet job on us! Just remember when you watch Independence Day part XIII - maybe it's us that are really the Aliens! Over the last year, we've found that the world is a very different place to what we'd perceived it to be before. 

Here's a little song I wrote last year on the subject of Injustice. Please have a listen.