Aliens will start WW3

Kourtney Kardashian, on principle, has never said anything relatable in her life. As a reality TV starlet, wellness gummy entrepreneur and Hollywood it-girl, there is little need to. And yet in a poignant moment of insight, Kardashian divulged, “I never read the news. It gives me bad vibes.”

A statement which at its very essence, encompasses the current mood of Australian society. You can’t turn the page of your newspaper, or more realistically, swipe on Instagram, without visibly recoiling. A sickening feeling in your stomach as you read about the hostages in Gaza, or the fallen soldiers of Ukraine. Our news cycle has become suffocating in its severity, to the extent that Australian readers are either desensitised or avoiding the news entirely. 

Because whilst reading this content, it’s jarring to confront the enormity of the evil our world is capable of. How could humans, the same people who burn their lips whilst drinking their morning tea, do such things? How on earth does Putin look at himself in the mirror? How do people storm kibbutzim, hold hostages, commit genocide?

It’s unfathomable. 

And entirely unreadable. Because the core of any good story from Harry Potter to Citizen Kane is empathy. That bond that we create between ourselves and another being that we see, essentially, as sharing our same humanity. Cinderella is just another girl. Bluey is just another kid. Oppenheimer is just another man. We can empathise and engage with each and every one of these characters because we see ourselves in them.

And it is in this fundamental truth that humans emotionally connect with people who they deem to be like them, that the cause of Kardashian concern was born. Because all of these tragedies that circulate on our news cycle are caused by one thing: aliens. 

All of these tragedies that circulate on our news cycle are caused by one thing: aliens. 

Not ET or Spock, but the aliens that Orwell wrote about in his essays on antisemitism. As Orwell saw it, an alien isn’t necessarily green, or adorned with antennae: it is simply a being that is not like us. Someone who is categorised as intrinsically ‘other’. Orwell theorised that once you view someone as alien, you could commit any number of evils against them. Once someone isn’t like you, it isn’t that big of a leap to think that they aren’t as human as you.

This mindset of alienation squashes curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge, instead encouraging judgment. Judgment is the quickest way to harbour overwhelming ignorance allowing for the mongering of hatred, the building of stereotypes, and the degradation of people until their identities are simplified to ‘them’ in contrast with us.

Once you are able to categorise someone as alien to you, judgement is where it starts. But the thing with alienating others is that in doing so, we are unable to learn anything about them. Alienating people is like pushing them into a really dark corner. You can’t see them, because you don’t want to. And I hate to point out the obvious, but humans are afraid of the dark. 

We don’t like what we don’t know, and worse than that, we demonise it.

And so, once a group is alienated, conflict arises. Where there is conflict, there is inevitably a power imbalance, and from this any number of evils can occur on a systemic level. That’s when the news becomes unreadable. That’s when children are held as hostages based purely upon their nationality. That’s when countries are invaded with the sole ethos that they are not the nation from which you come. That is when we see thousands of men, women and children: humans in their very essence, not alien at all, dead. 

Aliens start wars. You can see it in Nazi Germany, in the Rwandan genocide, in apartheid: alienation is an archaic, easy-bake recipe for heinous evil.

Martin Luther King wrote, “Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.” When the bonds of empathy that bind us to each living being dissolve, that is when our society begins to crumble, and our very perception of what is right and wrong is ruptured.  Because we are all such different people. We walk differently, we talk differently, we think differently, we love differently. But empathy allows for these differences to be points of curiosity, not judgment and fear-mongering.

And so, in her effervescent wisdom, Kourtney Kardashian was onto something. The news is, in short, ‘very bad vibes’.

Because, yes, on a grand level the news shows us global tragedy caused by alienation and to be honest, that is a bad vibe. But the worst vibe is that this breakdown of empathy, and lack of curiosity, is reflected in me. And you. News readers who purposely open the ABC app when other people are around to look really cool. Because when we inevitably click away from a heavy article with some excuse that falls under the ‘bad vibes’ category, we stop hearing stories about people who aren’t like us. 

We stop hearing about the Ukrainian grandmother Maria Nikolaevna who emerged from her bomb shelter with her three granddaughters to find their parents dead on the street outside their family home. We stop hearing about the child patients of a bombed Palestinian hospital holding a press conference, quite simply pleading “to live as other children live”. We stop hearing stories, and stories have the power to transform aliens into living, breathing humans.

Stories have the power to transform aliens into living, breathing humans.

These stories about devastation, and grief, and violence, are overwhelming. And at times, entirely depressing and seemingly insurmountable. But if we allow ourselves to turn away, we prevent those stories from being told. We dismantle the opportunity we have, in this digital world, to build bonds of empathy between people separated by oceans and races and wars and beliefs through stories that will break your heart, but that will make you care.

So if you don’t care to read the news, you’ll start to see aliens everywhere. It takes so little to view someone as other, to think that their circumstance could never be your own. And whilst that seems simple, and relatively harmless, if we allow our society to foster apathy towards the human story because it’s sad, or scary, or depressing: we’re making the very issue we deem to be ‘bad vibes’ worse. 

We’re allowing that same apathy and alienation that caused devastating warfare to fester in our living rooms like a bowl of two-day-old cornflakes. We’re allowing the manufacturing of aliens, and aliens have caused every war that has occurred on this planet.

But curiosity has the power to end them. So read the news. Open that ABC app proudly and face the stories of 2024. Just think, it one click, in one article, in one human story: you are eviscerating aliens. What could be cooler? 

Violet F, Year 11