(2026-03-29) TL;DR (True) Stories: "Four Million Years of Peace" by Peter Kambasis
If you look at the news right now, it feels like we’re sprinting backward. A handful of old, angry men are trying to set the planet on fire, dragging the rest of us into their endless, exhausting tantrums. Sudden military strikes happen -- no one approves. Innocent people die: women, children, treated as nothing more than collateral. And the leaders? They demand Peace Prizes while running everything like tyrants.
But what makes me angriest isn’t just the violence. It’s the cowardice that comes right after.
When a leader starts a massive, uncontainable fire, and people recoil at the inevitable fallout, what do these “leaders” do? They don’t stand by their decisions. They shift blame. Throw *their own people* under the bus. And they just take it. They’re scared, foolish, or just desperate enough to be this close to power that they let themselves be tricked into doing the dirty work for a man who refuses to take the fall.
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To make sense of all this, my mind wandered into a strange place today. Specifically a Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood:
The Transformers
In the 1984 pilot, the Autobots and Decepticons crash their ship, the Ark, into a volcano on Earth. They lie dormant in the rubble for four million years. As a kid, I thought, "How sad! Four million years of lost time."
But now, as an adult watching the world today, I see it differently. For four million years, Cybertron didn’t have Megatron. No screaming. No chest-pounding. Nobody demanding loyalty or threatening destruction. Just quiet.
Their robot planet probably took a breath, cleaned up the wreckage, and carried on.
It wasn’t until the volcano woke him that Megatron immediately called home to ruin everyone’s day again.
And here’s the kicker about Megatron that hits too close to home: he’s huge, towering, scary. But when it’s time to actually do damage? He turns into a handgun. Tiny. Impotent. He can’t operate on his own. He has to have someone else hold him and pull the trigger.
The metaphor writes itself: The men trying to destroy our planet act massive and terrifying -- but when it comes to actually fight or take responsibility? They shrink. They need someone else to do the shooting. And when it blows up, the finger points back at the hand that held the weapon.
Faced with that screaming, destructive presence, your first instinct? Attack the person holding the gun. Sure. But the ultimate victory isn’t hurting the pawn. You take the weapon from their hands, and you dismantle it. You break the toy. You destroy the weapon because it isn’t needed. The world doesn’t need ANY OF THIS.
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There are billions of us who don't want to conquer the universe. We just want to live, build things, take walks, and experience our brief time on this rock without being drafted into someone else’s pointless war.
We don’t need to try and debate egos that require constant maintenance.
We just need a highly specific space program: a rocket sturdy enough to pack in the Tiny Terminal Tyrants. We load them up, point the ship toward a large mountain on a distant, rocky moon, and let them crash into it. They can yell at the bulkheads all they want — their jail cells will be more than big enough for their tiny stupid guns.
And the rest of us? Finally, we get to work on our four million years of peace.
Or at least until the next moron is voted in 100 years from now.
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Story and audio editing by Peter Kambasis Story editing assisted by OpenA.i's ChatGPT ( https://chatgpt.com ) Voice of "Emma Blood": ChatGPT's "Sol" voice Music by Suno A.i Music ( https://tinyurl.com/ddv86kre )