I’ve lived on this planet for twenty-one years. I’ve seen hurt and I’ve felt pain. I’ve had my heart broken and had it mended. I’ve seen the birth of a child and the death of a man. I’ve gone from rags to riches. I’ve sailed until the east met the west. I’ve climbed the highest mountains and swum down into the deepest oceans. I’ve seen things no man should see. Every time I have survived and live to fight another day; that was until earlier this week.
It started, as any normal day should, with me sleeping through all eleven alarms only to be woken by the sheer panic of being late to my Intellectual Property class.
Realizing that I was up an hour early, I groggily reached for my phone and began my sacred ritual of reading the morning news. There was nothing out of the ordinary: “Iphone 5 release sparks civil war,” “NFL refs mistake Moon for asteroid,” “Kony found with Waldo”; nothing more than just the usual news of the world trying to tear itself in two. Joking with one story from the Daily Mail, a newspaper from the UK, stopped me cold. “A-Pork-alyspe is coming,” it read, “Bacon, pork shortage ‘now unavoidable’ in 2013.” Google it. I’m not making this up.
I don’t know what hit the floor faster, my phone or my heart. Sporadically fumbling for my phone, I grabbed it and began to flip back and forth through the news articles trying to find the source of my anxiety.
“Maybe it was an article by the Onion sponsored by the Mail,” I quickly rationalized. Maybe I was still asleep, trapped in the depths of some kind of sick and agonizing nightmare. Maybe it was something I ate. Maybe the Mayans were right.
I stopped.
There it was, staring me in the face, mocking me, “Bacon, pork shortage ‘now unavoidable’ and there’s nothing you can do about it, Gaines Halstead. Nothing. It’s hopeless. Give up now. Quit while you’re ahead.”
I couldn’t shake the idea of solitary eggs and lonely hash browns being served every morning to families across the nation. What would become of the coveted BLT? Who honestly wants just a LT? What will small round steaks be wrapped in? What about Baconcaisse? We can’t just spread plain mayonnaise on a sandwich; that’s ridiculous. You might as well take away everything else holy in the world; Wrestlemania, capitalism and guns. What’s a man supposed to do? What would Ron Swanson do? He, along with every man on the planet, would be driven to madness and forced to enjoy their morning all-star breakfast with only a measly serving of sausage. Madness, pure madness.
The visions of terror began flooding in, visions of a horrendous future living in a world devoid of bacon, plunged into chaos. I was swept away to a bleak time when the hollow crumbling shells of great institutions like IHOP, Denny’s and Waffle House dotted the landscape, serving as relics of a bygone era. The Great Bacon Demise and the collapse of civilization of ’12, they would call it. History books would tell of times when men carelessly enjoyed their dishes with gratuitous amounts of bacon with no regard whatsoever. “Like kings they live,” it would say, “knowing not of what they did.”
Panic stricken, I jumped out of bed. Of course I didn’t go to class. How could I? Who could possibly take the time to attend a MatLab recitation with the apocalypse barreling towards them? I was too concerned with preventing the inevitable. Something had to be done. So I decided to write this plea, a beckoning if you will, for all bacon lovers here at Tech and across the globe to rise up, unite and put a stop to this insanity.
The time has come for humanity to band together, lay down our arms and forget our differences. We aren’t talking about something silly like “global warming” or “nuclear holocaust,” we’re talking about the end of something bigger than that, something bigger than all of us. We are at DEFCON one. The seven seals have been broken and the four riders of the apocalypse are saddled up. We’re on the highway into the danger zone.
Look in the mirror and ask yourself if you really want to live in a world without bacon. Imagine explaining to your kids that breakfast as we know it is now gone forever. Is this a world that you truly want to live in? I doubt it. Tech is full of brilliant minds that, when combined together, could easily find a solution to this problem. So let’s take back what is ours. Let’s take back our lives, our liberty and our happiness.