prompt: green, title: queen jealousy, envy, waits in misc. flash fiction

There’s more than enough here for everyone. Nine billion or so human beings on this blue-green clod, and exponentially more resources than we could ever need, provided we could more or less share equitably. If we dialed it back on being cruel greedy pricks just a bit, everyone would have a decent shot at a long healthy life. If pressed, even the wealthiest monster on Earth would admit this, they would just equivocate and say it’s not their fault those poor are stupid and lazy, ‘if they wanted food, they shoulda trickled down their bootstraps’ or whatever incoherent lies a boarding school told them to spout. If forced, worse yet they’d hire a holy man to say they’re rich because they’re blessed by God because if they don’t have that, they have to admit their largesse is stolen from the poor. As for the poor, they’re left blaming themselves for laziness they don’t possess, or The Devil for cursing them, because it’s been made dangerous to admit that’s all it’d take for this life to be nearly perfect. If every person decided in unison to not be monstrous? That pain ceases.
Let alone the fact that I have the sneaking suspicion God, and also even The Devil, would prefer their Names stay out the mouths of people like that. God is disappointed in their cruelty whereas Satan’s probably offended having such transparent clumsiness associated with his slick schemes.

But it’s bigger than that, it’s more timeless than that. A lot of people have convinced themselves that, yes, there’s more than enough now, with crop rotation and pesticide and rocket ships to the moon, but that this must be some kind of modern innovation. Kings and queens and CEOs must have been necessary once, they’ve been convinced, back before humans had all this technology and all these bright shiny “isms” to organize ourselves around. Which is not the case here at all. From a few thousand hominids in the Great Rift Valley with stone points and sticks to whatever we are, with our billions, our internet, our imaginary ways of constructing imaginary currencies to transmit the real work of the many into the coffers of posturing thieves? It has never changed. There was always more than enough here for everyone! From caves or trees to That Bronze Age Collapse, the Renaissance to now, our bottleneck was never technology or organizational forms. There was always enough to go around and barring some great cataclysm I’m certain Tech Bros are working at inventing as I type? There’ll almost always be far more than enough for all of us.

From ancient jungles in Madagascar a million years ago to the urban squalor of Mumbai today, it isn’t mercantilists or socialists or Christians or ancestor worshippers shaping all this inequity. No germ theories or atomic physics or anything as such. Just too many people making that choice to embrace hate and fear, rejecting empathy and love. So, tell me truly. Which path do you choose?