The Open-Sourced Life
A humanitarian satire that probes the emotional economics of child sponsorship, global compassion, and personal guilt. This dispatch spoofs activist branding with bread-and-chocolate diplomacy, open-source metaphors, and squiggly-eyed goanna berries. Aid, absurdity, and affection—served with a wink and a conscience.
Just finished a fun weekend with my kids. These days it’s always such a treat to have them over. It’s like being a kid again.
When they go, a bit of a void is left; that’s only natural; its absence would be the bigger tragedy.
And then a letter arrives and I remember that I have another child.
I receive letters from him quite often; around six a year; filled with such gratitude and love (he calls me papa). It’s a better quality virtual hug than anything you can download.
I don’t reply anywhere near as often as I should, and that irks me! I really just don’t know what to say.
I don’t sponsor him out of love though; it’s part guilt and part duty; not the purest of motives.
But I get to pay for my sins! $40 a month; a bargain really, and a whole lot easier than love.
It seems we have more or less traded in love for a bunch of causes. Busily running around trying to cool the planet; save the whales and the trees and the polar bears and (for all I know) the squiggly-eyed fart-faced goanna berry.
We rise up against terrorists and pedophiles and drugs in sport; killing in the name of freedom, road rage and water restrictions; righteously hating our fellow-political-corrections.
But it’s not hate is it? The opposite of love is not hate; it never has been; the opposite of love is fear. And the cure for fear is love; which we’ve lost the knack for, so here we huddle and regroup and stay afraid.
Now all I did was put one child back on his feet; and for that I got to see real love aimed in my direction; and some sweeter part of life came back to me from afar.
My fellow amoebas!
I believe it is in our own best interest to get the whole bloody lot of them back on their feet, so they can love us the way my other child loves me; and heal the whole bloody lot of us in the process. Because love casts out fear and love makes love.
Fixing all this other shit would be a breeze after that; we’d have our vision back; and with it our visionaries.
How? Hmmm.
Global military air drops of left-over bread would be a start. All supermarkets in all countries required to provide a significant portion of leftover bread (and chocolate). Transit mechanisms. Domestic ships to carry a fixed number of containers of donated food. Logos, symbols, product branding, honest celebrity support, competitions, get the best online-marketeers involved. You can throw money at this one.
There are all sorts of ideas; we just need to get people thinking about it; hook it all together; stand back, and watch for the miracle.
Proof?
Take a look at the open-source software community; they’ve clearly shown that the best things in life are free.
Isn’t it about time we all started living the open-sourced life.
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and full-time tinkerer of tags. He once wrote a poem about recursion that never ended, and a JavaScript confession that crashed three browsers. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and nostalgic detours. He believes in the transformative power of satire, the elegance of well-placed meta tags, and the occasional necessity of poetic nonsense.
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The Mee Goreng of Life
This piece is a heartfelt, satirical sermon on modern love, guilt, activism, and the possibility of global redemption through generosity. It’s part memoir, part manifesto, part marketing pitch for a humanitarian revolution — with a tone that’s equal parts weary, wise, and wonderfully irreverent. The metaphor of “open-sourced life” is brilliant: collaborative, decentralized, and powered by love instead of fear.