Space Opera

Here`s what you have to understand about intergalactic civil wars: they`re functuonally identical to the knockdown, door-slamming, plage-smashing, wall-penetrating, shriek-sobbing drama of any high-strung couple you`ve ever met. The whole business means a great deal to those involved and far, far less tha nthe pressing issue of what to have for lunch to anyone outside their blast radius. No one can agree on how it started or whose fault it was, no one cares about the neighbors trying to bloody well sleep while it`s banging on, and not one thing in heaven or on Earth matters half as much as getting the last word in the end. Oh, it was all innocence and discovery and heart-shaped nights on the sofa at first! But then someone didn`t do the laundry for two weeks, and now it`s nothing but tears and red faces and imprecations against one person or the other`s slovenly upbringing and laser cannons and singularity-bombs and untimatums and hollering, I never want to see you again, I really mean it this time or You`re really just like your mother or What do you mean you vapor-mined the Alunizar homeworld -- that`s a war crime, you monster, until suddenly everyone`s standing in the pile of smoking rubble that has become their lives wondering how they`ll ever get their security deposit back. It`s waht comes of cramming too much personality into too little space.
And there is always too little space.
But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you`ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

"I really don`t know what you`re talking about," said the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. "We`re doing great. Turn on any news channel, they`ll tell you. Taxes are low, business is booming, crime is down, the Patriots win the Super Bowl every year, and we`re finally getting our country back. I`ll admit, it used to be a real nightmare around here. If you`d have shown up five years ago, I`d agree with you. So many filthy, ungrateful protestors, clogging up traffic, breaking windows, whining about every little thing that didn`t go their way. But that`s all in the past! Look around! Clean streets. Quiet streets. Empty streets ready for commerce. Everyone I know is happy."
Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We`ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It`s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monster who can only be stopped by monster with badges. It`s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you`re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can`t be botherede not to, butchering another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the feelting, unique fragile lives of everyone you`ve ever met if it means you consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can`t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tisuse without having to really work for it. None of you seem to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that might arouse your sluggish organs? Yes, of course, you`ve done some clever things with your time. No one is denying that rhythmic gymnastics are really just terrific. But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don`t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behaviour of a sentient race. It is the behaviour of wild animals. Even your babies view anyone who doesn`t look just exactly like their parents with seething suspicion. It`s baked into your. I`ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we`re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss. But lucky you -- we`re better than that. We are not monsters. We have our process. The process works. We do not deviate from the process. Perhaps you could think of it as instructions from corporate. Not to be disobeyed, if you don`t want to be sacked.