How We Overthrew Earth in Ten Easy Steps

The man stood at the lectern of the New United Nations and straightened his papers slowly. He addressed the assembly slowly and deliberately. “As you know, I have been elected the new leader of Planet Earth.” There was a murmur among the audience, but no protests. The people knew he was duly elected and had no qualms with his ideology. “We studied your planet for many years to find out the way to conquer you. We realized early on, that force would not work. Bombs, guns, tanks and mass destruction would not work. That seemed to cause you to band together in solidarity. Solidarity could destroy any enemy that attacked your people. We had to come up with another plan to defeat you. Eventually, we realized the best way to destroy you was from within. We had to learn to bide our time and work slowly to insinuate ourselves into your planet. (1) First, we realized that religion held your people together. There were many types of worship on Earth, but the power of religion was strong. We managed to get it thrown out of schools. We started with prayer, then we moved on to abolishing the Nativity plays and even the mention of a higher power in the classroom. This made it easier to convince the population that there was not going to be help from “above” to rescue them from the bad things in life. Then, we sowed dissention among the various religions and made them suspicious of each other. This encouraged them to give up hope. (2) We encouraged dissention between the classes by whispering of the differences in how each class was treated by the other. It didn’t matter that all had the same chances of success. It only mattered that we planted the idea and waited to watch it grow and take on a life of it’s on. We convinced the poor they were poor because the rich were conspiring against them. We convinced the rich the poor were lazy and unable to manage on their own. We convinced the races that all the other races were inferior. We marveled at how easy it was to manipulate the people of earth. (3) Convincing the poor they deserved what the rich had without working for it was a little harder, but we were able to bring them around with a new word we invented, called Entitlement. Little whispers were powerful things to you. For some reason, you listened to things said softly with much more acceptance than things said loudly. We never quite figured that one out, but none the less, it was effective. (4) Taking control of your children was our greatest accomplishment. We stopped the parent’s interference by enacting laws that gradually moved parenting from the home to the schools and the government. Children spent more and more time away from their parents and we were able to convince them the parents were interfering in their success. We enacted laws that kept parents from disciplining their children. We encouraged them to disrespect the parents and gradually to learn disdain for them. The children were our easiest conquest. We were most proud of that accomplishment. (5) Guns were probably the hardest to take from people. We had to convince them that guns were evil. We made sure that any accidents with guns were blown out of proportion. Enacting laws “for the protection” of children were fairly easy. Taking the guns from people was much harder. It had to be done slowly, quietly, and effectively. First we had the owners registered. Then we had certain guns restricted. Then we simply passed laws that made it illegal to own them. For the holdouts who didn’t register their weapons, we enacted laws to make sure their lives were no longer their own. We made sure the only people who could own guns were our people and our sympathizers. (6) We made it mandatory to vote. We couldn’t have people refusing to vote because they disagreed with candidates or laws being enacted. Since it was mandatory, we knew how everyone voted and we knew who the dissidents were and were able to delete their votes and replace them with our own. (7) Convincing people that abortion was a woman’s “right” took a little longer than we expected. At first we realized that there would be religious objections, but eventually we were able to work it out. Those abortions allowed us to further desensitize people to death. (8) Television shows and video games aided us in this death desensitization as well. We were able to introduce children to seeing death and destruction at a young age. By the time it took full effect, they were able to see actual death and destruction in real life and merely stand by and watch. Some even egged the offenders on or recorded the events for “posterity”. (9) Dissolving marriage took the longest. Making the family unit a thing of the past was almost a lost cause. First we convinced the people they didn’t need a “piece of paper” to make a family. That was easy enough. We made divorce easier for those who decided they weren’t compatible. Instead of working on a marriage to make stronger, we convinced them that they could just walk away and find an easier life. We convinced them the marriage license was useless. Then, we convinced them that living together was just as much of a commitment as being married. Being able to walk away from commitment with no strings was lauded as the best thing for everyone. Children were taught there was no such thing as a stable family. Grownups wandered in and out of their lives. They grew up believing relationships were never stable and family was disposable. (10) Computers and cell phones separated your people from each other. There became no personal interaction between friends or even family. Tweeting, Texting, Facebooking, and Snap Chatting took the place of looking people in the eyes and having actual conversations. People stopped caring what happened to others. That was the final straw in our takeover of your planet. When people stop caring about each other, they lost the empathy needed to resist us. All original inhabitants of earth will begin receiving draft notices by e-mail immediately. These numbers, are for registration in the newly formed Earth and Terrestrial Procurement Program. We are setting up transplant farms at this moment to enable us to provide organs for important people in the administration and in the population. People deemed not productive to society will be placed on these farms and used as needed for any needed medical procedures and experimentation we require. Plans are also underway to use some of these unwanted people to maintain a food supply for the ever growing population moving to this planet from other worlds. We trust there will continue to be no attempts to defy our possession of your planet. We have conquered other planets using the same formula as we have here and we continue to meet no resistance. We have other plans ahead for this planet and look forward to implementing them as soon as possible. There will be no questions answered. You should have asked them long before now. You have heard this edict. Please remain calm and carry on with your daily lives.