Well, it’s four years later, and here we are, still dug into our stubborn ideological trenches. Me, with a passionate belief in a pervasive force that exerts its pull on all objects, creating relative balance within our solar system and drawing us toward the center of the planet. And you, with your equally firm conviction that the sensation of weight I mention is the result of invisible anti-freedom ropes woven by gay Democratic warlocks and lashed to your limbs so your arms feel heavy when you reach for your guns or try to pray.
I admit, before four years ago, I never pegged you as someone who’d go in for such theories. They seemed pretty wacky, and you always struck me as a down-to-earth sort of person. A little stubborn and opinionated, sure, and let’s face it, a couple degrees shy of not-racist, but we could talk about issues, at least.
Sadly, the last few years changed all that, what with your steady stream of “Don’t Fall for Falling” memes and shared videos of anti-downers hatefully smashing sleeves of Fig Newtons. In one heated Facebook thread, you called me a “gravitool.” That was mean, and I haven’t forgotten it. But the political winds are shifting, and I’m still holding out hope. I believe we can find common ground again if you’ll just acknowledge the possibility that gravity is an actual scientific phenomenon and not a magical deep-state plot.
Remember fifth grade, when we were on the same team for the Egg Drop Challenge? That was fun, right? Remember the thrill of anticipation, standing there atop the stairwell? The keen expectation that when we dropped the egg — which we’d ensconced in layers of notebook paper, bendy straws, and tape — over the railing, the egg would travel somewhere else, and that somewhere would likely be down? And then, how the egg fell, plummeting several flights and bouncing upon impact? If you recall, our egg broke — thanks to Mike Seltzer’s lazy Scotch tape work — and we missed out on the competition’s prize, which was a box of Airheads. We sure loved Airheads back then, didn’t we? But even amidst our disappointment — in ourselves, but mostly in Mike Seltzer — there was a clear takeaway that day, no?
Given fond gravity-related memories like that one, seeing you peddling conspiracy theories about the tides being faked with underwater turbines bankrolled by George Soros, proclaiming “black holes don’t matter” and throwing around #StoptheDrop hashtags at every turn has been weird and disheartening, to say the least.
Recently, it seems your anti-gravity worldview has enmeshed with your belief that Democrats stole the presidential election. I don’t pretend to follow the logic, but I mean, just for the sake of argument, without gravity, how would state officials even distribute hundreds of thousands of ballots, let alone steal or misplace them, with all the ballots floating around in the air? What would the logistics be? Would they use big nets? And why aren’t Democratic lawmakers (who I assume are exempt from the magical anti-freedom-rope restraints, given their party affiliation) drifting weightlessly through the halls of Congress every day, glancing off walls and somersaulting in midair like minimum-wage-obsessed astronauts? And while we’re at it, how did all those right-wing rioters storm the Capitol on January 6th, without gravitational mass to assist with their breaking down of doors and to give their flagpoles heft as they attacked those policemen?
But there I go, indulging you again.
Listen, I’m all for healthy interrogation of the status quo, and I know our dizzying information ecosystem can make it hard to tell north from south, but I have to draw the line somewhere. So, what do you say? Can we put aside our angst over electoral outcomes and policy preferences and suppose, at the very least, that we live in the same universe of observable Newtonian laws?
No?
In that case, I wish you well. We’ll always have the Egg Drop.