A genie, three wishes and my brilliant idea
You might not believe this, but I found a magic lamp half buried in the sand at low tide on a beach near Boca in South Florida last time I was there visiting family. I didn’t tell anyone because I’ve been contemplating my important first wish before I awaken the genie.
Be careful what you wish for and all that. I take my cliches seriously.
And before you make a rookie mistake, everyone knows your first wish can’t be to wish for more wishes.
Having three wishes is plenty, believe me. It is a BIG responsibility. Once I rub that lamp it is game on — except it’s not a game. I really do have a magic lamp and my wishes could change the world.
That’s why my first thought for my first wish was for world peace. What kind of person would I be if my first wish wasn’t for world peace?
Is anything more important than world peace? If you were me, wouldn’t you feel duty-bound to wish for world peace? If someone found out you didn’t make world peace a priority, they’d think less of you and no one wants that.
The world needs peace now. It needed peace yesterday. It’s urgent. We need peace. The end.
So I was all ready to wish for world peace but then I got suspicious, what if there was a hidden caveat to world peace that the genie had neglected to tell me about? What if, to achieve world peace, the population couldn’t exceed 4 billion people, or something. The ancient Greeks believed a healthy society consisted of no more than five or ten thousand people. Or was it five hundred? I can’t remember, but what if the optimum population for world peace had a cutoff point? Since we’re nine billion souls on this earth, quite a few innocent billions would cease to exist.
That wouldn’t go over well.
Genies make sure the fine print is minuscule so you can’t possibly read it. They aren’t human and they sorta kinda want you to mess up. They spend hundreds of years in that lamp bored out of their minds waiting for some greedy, stupid human to let them out. Understandably it makes them hostile. They also feel superior and fully expect us to wish for something that will come back to bite us in the ass.
Genies can’t help but be mean-spirited, so instead of world peace, I thought I could get around any hidden clauses by wishing for world compassion. I can’t see any impediment to world compassion. Can you?
If everyone were suddenly compassionate, there would be no more narcissists throwing their weight around and pushing their egos in everyone’s faces. No one would drop a bomb on anyone else because they wouldn’t want to hurt their neighbors.
Diplomats and government officials would spend their time negotiating fair trade agreements and designing systems that encourage friendly borders and the sharing of resources and information. No more posturing. No more threats. No more war.
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Racism would disappear, finally and for good this time.
No more evil geniuses trying to hack your bank account. A definite plus.
And really great news! How could I forget! No more poverty! That’s huge!
I can’t see a downside.
If I didn’t have a genie locked and loaded, we could all smoke lots of pot and achieve world peace that way. Getting stoned shouldn’t be underestimated. I mean, stoned people are usually pretty chill. No one would feel much like fighting since stoners are not usually confrontational. World compassion might be like the whole world getting stoned but staying alert. Needless to say, the snack industry would have to ramp up production.
But since I do have a genie ready to go, I would prefer to make my wish while sober. It would be a waste of a good genie otherwise. How often does a magic lamp come around in one’s lifetime? Not often. I was a bit surprised to find one at all, to be honest.
Back to my brilliant idea of world compassion.
In a compassionate world, we’d still work hard and invent things and dream about going to the stars. We would still write novels and build boats and keep sheep and dance and enjoy the occasional glass of wine. Preferably Shiraz.
I considered the three typical wishes: beauty, riches, and immortality. The cliché three, but the more I thought about them, the more those wishes felt like a trap.
If I had great beauty, for example, maybe I’d never have a moment of peace. Maybe everyone would clamor to be around me and love me for my looks but never really love the real me. Maybe I’d be one of the loneliest people on the planet.
Wealth comes at a price, usually at the expense of someone else. Maybe I’d be hated by everyone. I mean who really likes rich people? I like being liked so I would probably give all my riches away anyway. It’s so tempting to want to be rich, but I realized I would be happiest with just enough instead of too much.
And as far as being immortal is concerned, living forever in a cruel, inhumane, crippled world would be like living forever in hell.
No, after about two weeks carefully taking the magic lamp out from under my bed and staring at it for hours then just as carefully putting it back again so no action could be misconstrued as rubbing, I decided I just needed the one wish. With that one wish all other wishes become moot. With world compassion, I’d be happy. You’d be happy. We’d all be happy.
So, unless you have an objection, world compassion it is!
I’ll give you a couple of days to think about it, then I’m rubbing the lamp.
