Can We Talk About the Aliens?

bro i don’t care if aliens are real i want to be able to go to the den­tist. 
@katierose via Instagram

Can we talk about the aliens?

Early this sum­mer, David Grusch, a for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, declared under oath that the U.S. is con­ceal­ing a decades-long pro­gram to retrieve and reverse engi­neer uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects (aka UFOs) – or what are offi­cial­ly known as “uniden­ti­fied anom­alous phe­nom­e­na” (UAPs). He tes­ti­fied before Congress that the U.S. like­ly has been aware of “non-human activ­i­ty” since the 1930s and is cur­rent­ly har­bor­ing alien spacecraft.

National Air and Space Intelligence Center offi­cer Jonathan Grey had this to add: “The non-human intel­li­gence phe­nom­e­non is real. We are not alone.” 

Aliens exist y’all.

This ought to be life-chang­ing, mind-blow­ing news. We should be shocked or ter­ri­fied or even exis­ten­tial­ly hope­ful that this will for­ev­er alter the tra­jec­to­ry of humankind. 

But no one seems to care. The news was met with an apa­thet­ic, col­lec­tive shrug. Initially, I assumed most peo­ple just prob­a­bly didn’t believe it. Neither polit­i­cal par­ty seems to trust the gov­ern­ment these days. One meme by @missmayn joked that “aliens are gonna be super con­fused when they show up threat­en­ing to over­throw our lead­ers and we’re all stoked and offer to help.”

But per­haps we’re just under­whelmed by alien life because we are so over­whelmed by this life. 

We find our­selves in a unique­ly stress­ful time to exist and have no more band­width for trau­ma. If we were to cat­a­log our major wor­ries, aliens would prob­a­bly fall at the bot­tom of the list behind cli­mate change, post-glob­al pan­dem­ic exhaus­tion, health care costs, moun­tain­ous school debt, sys­temic racism, gun vio­lence, what­ev­er fresh hell AI is bring­ing, and fas­cist-like laws that only ben­e­fit rich, white, het­ero­nor­ma­tive males. As @goldngodsdesire post­ed on Instagram, “Aliens are real” yeah, I know, low­er the cost of living.”

Trauma exhaus­tion is a real thing. We can only process so much stress before our brains tap out and we dis­so­ci­ate. It’s our old­est sur­vival instinct. We have so many imme­di­ate con­cerns – like how will I pay rent and the gro­cery bill this month? – we don’t have the men­tal capac­i­ty to wor­ry about all the poten­tial threats – like being abduct­ed and probed by lit­tle green men. 

Fight or flight is evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly ben­e­fi­cial, but humans just aren’t built to stay there long-term. At some point, our sys­tem shuts down. When we don’t have the ener­gy to care, the dor­sal vagal parasym­pa­thet­ic sys­tem takes over, acti­vat­ing the rep­til­ian instinct to freeze, sleep, or just dis­en­gage from every­thing around us. We might take to our beds or numb our wor­ries with alco­hol, car­bo­hy­drates, or Netflix binging. 

My poet soul wants so bad­ly to be awed and inspired by the idea that we are not alone in the uni­verse. But even I can­not con­tem­plate the cos­mos right now. I have too much else on my psy­cho­log­i­cal plate.

@_graceduah said it best when she tweet­ed this: “Are aliens going to fix infla­tion, can­cel stu­dent debt, end work­er exploita­tion, pay any of these bills, turn the temp down on this plan­et; and all around bring hap­pi­ness to me and my friends mis­er­able lives? No? Then yeah- they can get tf.”