Going Global

Life, is a salmon tin.

We are all living inside one. It is called Earth. Previously, us Sri Lankans were living in a smaller tin called Sri Lanka or Serendib/Thmbapanni or any of the other names we called our country. Fact was, the name of the island bore no real relevance, for then we fought and killed each other to our hearts content only identifying ourselves in terms of which highly divisive feudal kingdom we belonged to. All this, of course only until some bigger fish from another tin invaded our little tin. I believe they were of the Protugese variety.

And then the Dutch. followed by the British. Thats when the whole sense of a Sri Lankan identity came into being. And we fought as a nation to take back our little salmon tin. So did external influence play a part in bringing this about? sure seems like it.

This is a phenomenon that has taken place in every single nation of the world. We only fight over what we know exists. Back in those days we only possessed a hazy idea of the rest of the world in general and therefore couldn’t get our heads around the fact that there was anything really bigger than this island of ours. Same thing happened in India, same thing in the UK, same all over the world.

Individual nations have become larger and larger. As the smaller ones have been swallowed up. Ireland was one of the last to go, most of the pacific islands were snapped up in the last world war. So where do we go to next?

What if. What if some advance alien civilization invaded our dank atmosphere and made their presence felt? Would the ensuing economic and security implications make us finally get together under a banner of a united Earth?

Would we simply proceed to identify ourselves as “Earthlings’ instead of ‘Americans’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘Sri Lankans’ etc? We would. As the universe reveals itself to us as a very much ‘real’ place all our petty bickering over this minute planet would die down and in good old bloodthirsty human fashion, we would proceed to pool our resources and steal whatever we can from the advanced aliens to launch our own ‘war against slime’ on some underdeveloped planet on a distant star system. We would all start fighting in the salmon tin of the Milky Way. And who knows how many eons later, if we ever do survive, or live to encounter a substantial external threat, maybe even the Great Salmon Tin of the Universe.

And then only the green skinned, big headed blokes with the funny antenna would be the bad guys. The rest of us can well, rest easy.