ALMOST HUMAN
‘Getting to know you, getting to know all about you!’
How ironic this song now sounds.
When we first came to this planet, we’d been travelling for millennia of your time. Our planet had been destroyed, when our sun went super nova. We piled into our spacecraft and searched the universe for a new home, where we would be welcome (again how ironic).
Our first contacts with your world, led to an exchange of technology and the development of secret underground bases, where some of our people could live and work in peace, cementing the relationships with our new hosts. Although we were only a few hundred thousand, we needed more room than even these hidden places could provide. Our forward bases provided us with data for colonisation and now, fifty years later, we are here in force on this planet.
It started with internment camps all over the Earth. It was thought best to slowly acclimatise the local inhabitants - firstly to our existence, then to us physically being here.
Reactions? The heaven and hell of integration. The vast majority were apprehensive - wondering and checking us out all the time (hoping for the best but expecting the worst - disease, war, famine).
Some hated beyond belief - others loved but just a little too much and in a creepy, perverted kind of way. I don’t know which is worse - overly curious or overtly hostile.
It’s easier to kill or destroy that which is new, strange, than struggle to understand it. Some of us have embraced these differences between us and seen it as a challenge worth exploring and exploiting; others want to leave now, this instant and wish we’d never landed.
We are an old race. We expected difficulties. we see it in our own people, let alone our relationship to others.
Your prejudices cast their shadow over many areas of your lives: City and country folk; rich and poor; male and female; young and old; straight and homosexual, left and right wing politics, left and right handed; ginger haired and blond; black and white - your smell, your looks, your clothes, your beliefs and now you’ve got us - a whole new ball game, a whole new race of beings to love or hate, mend or break, blend in with or reject and eject from your lives (new fears to overcome or to overcome you).
The world governments fought hard to keep our existence a secret. at least at the start. For that we thank them. Those were the best of times for us - interacting with your officials, military and scientists. We are more interested in minds than bodies. Our interests as a race drifted away from the physical aeons ago. Now though, with more open contact with your people, we’re forced to confront our own physicality again and rekindle a form of life we thought dead. We are being challenged by this touchy-feely world in other words.
It has led to clubs, where our race and yours interact (Wanting and not wanting to be a part of something - denial and affirmation interplay). It has also led to more emotional games that both our races deplore - gang warfare, with their humiliating initiation ceremonies - in other words, pride and shame - the temptation of forbidden fruit/ the betrayal of former allegiances: Wanting to be accepted by a new culture, so rejecting the old one and its values.
‘Do-be-do, I want to be like you: Walk like you, talk like you’
We’ve found the simplest things explain best what is happening between us and helps us understand you. Childhood games for instance, tells us about your adult games too - Catchings, Pass the Parcel (of responsibility), Snakes and Ladders, Cops and Robbers.
This mutual exchange has led to some ugly episodes - vivisection, botched plastic surgery to look like each other: We tell our young to use their minds, to alter how humans see them but they say that doesn’t stop them seeing who they really are, when they look in the mirror. Thankfully we have machines that can mimic the anatomical appearance of other races and for some that is enough. For others though, even this doesn’t satisfy them. For these beings, only transmigration of the soul fits the bill. Their spirits enter a human body and they know what it feels like to be truly human in every detail, even passing for Earth men in every facet of their lives.
Who can blame them for wanting to change?
“You smell!”
“God, you ugly little dwarves!”
“Your skin feels oily and horrible!”
“Why don’t you talk like ordinary people do?” (We are telepaths with telekinetic abilities).
“How can you eat that disgusting mess?”
“Freaks!”
“Weirdos!”
Our culture, our beliefs are just too different for some people but thankfully not all. We found as a race that as we go through the universe, the universe goes through us and that things don’t so much change as exchange. In other words, life is composed of two streams of reality - one coming, one going; one creating a new life for themselves and the other destroying their old one as they leave this existence.
This difference led to the alien riots, within a few years of our arrival as fear grabbed the local population and they saw only the negative aspects of about our being here.
“Our jobs, our health - who knows what diseases they carry?” They said about us, without a thought what illnesses they could pass onto us too (One sided, fear filled panic, ran riot). We became scapegoats for all their troubles and worries.
Time has moved on thankfully.
Now we can enjoy life here more as both the curiosity and prejudice have subsided somewhat. We now send out our own scientific expeditions across the World as well as into the oceans. We teach our ways to others and learn from them. We also send out missions to help heal the sick and improve the life of the poor, so ordinary people know we are here for them too and that there are advantages to letting us stay here, on this planet. It has been a bumpy ride but at last the storm over our presence is abating. I cannot promise your people or our own that new problems won’t arise, only that we will do our best to overcome them and that it is to our mutual advantage to do so. The more our differences are explored and exploited, the better it will be for all concerned. That this cannot be rushed is also true (Everything has its time and pace to unfold).
We have had to accept that meeting in the middle, means lowering ourselves to humanities level and raising them to ours. It is a mutual educational program, where we descend into their hell and they rise to our heaven as it were (They become more sophisticated and we become more crude, in relationship to each other).
This is the sacrifice parents make for their children, women for their husbands and a failing civilisation makes for a rising one like yours. It is the way of the universe and all things bow to this reality because it has no choice in the matter. So we too accept our fate as you rebel against yours, to create your present life. We are your future as you are our past. The present is our common ground. This is the tragedy and the comedy of the situation - the horror and the humour, the knowing and not knowing, the wanting and not wanting. We have seen the light and now seek the dark, to rest in. We found eternity and journeyed through infinity - now seeking a finite life again.
Some day we’ll integrate as the cultural and physical differences between us disintegrate. Now however the scars of this collision are too great, like the wounds an asteroid makes, when it collides with a planet’s surface.
One day nobody will think that we are anything but ‘human’ and that’s the irony of the current situation of distrust and hatred. As the two halves struggle now, they will in the future fight together as one, to protect their mutual home against a new foreign invader from out there and forget their past roles as enemies (estranged beings): ‘A friend is an enemy that you haven’t said good-bye to yet as an enemy is a friend you haven’t said hello to’ as our people say.
27 Nov 2012, 5:58 am
