Burrito Party

One fine day, everyone woke up with amnesia. Nobody knew who was rich, who was poor, who had power over whom…. No one remembered if they were a boss or a servant. No one remembered what their job was: President? Newspaper deliverer? Of course, all wars stopped because no one could remember what they were fighting about. Who’s ancestral home promised to them by God? What chain of grievances?

All prejudices were forgotten, all pretense of superiority and inferiority. There was no class, no hierarchy. People wandered the streets blinking, as if just waking up from a very complicated and stupid dream.

Two people walked up to each other. They forgot their names, so they just called one another “friend.”

“I’m hungry, friend.”

“Me too, friend. Let’s get a burrito.”

They looked around, saw a sign indicating a burrito shop. It was freshly abandoned but, of course, unlocked, so they went in, not knowing how much a burrito cost or which one of them had or did not have the money to pay for it. One of them jumped to the other side of the counter and made them both giant, delicious burritos.

There was a man who used to be a president. He had just been about to order his generals to bomb a neighborhood of poor people because of a political conflict. But he didn’t know he was President, so he too wandered the street. He walked by a food distribution center and came across a child whom he would have dropped a bomb on if not for the amnesia. The child was hungry, so he took the child to the burrito shop where the two friends were eating.

“Hello friends!” said one of the people inside the shop. “Would you like burritos?” They all ate burritos and sat and laughed. Ingredients drew low at the burrito shop. The man who used to be President (but didn’t know it) offered to walk over to the food distribution center to see if they could help. When he opened the large door, there was a party going on inside. Everybody was eating delicious looking food.

“I need some burrito ingredients,” said the ex-president.

The partiers showed him to the walk-in fridge where he found what he needed. He returned to the burrito shop. By then, there were more folks hanging out, singing songs whose origins they had forgotten. They had a burrito party.

And so it went, forever. People just helped each other out. Nobody knew they were supposed to have more than anybody else. Nobody knew about electronically stored money in banks, and money lost all meaning. Because there was no money, there was no reason to amass excess resources and no reason to create things that people didn’t need. So there was far less pollution from factories. The planet breathed a sigh of relieve and the animals came out of hiding.

The end.