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I don’t believe this but maybe you will. Probably you won’t believe it either.
The time is now, and the place is a yet undiscovered planet toward the edge of the Milky way. Of course, the beings who live on this planet know who they are and where they live. By undiscovered, I mean that other than you and I, no one who doesn’t live on the planet knows about it; and even if they did, it and the people living on it would be of little to no interest. Neither they nor their planet is anything special in the scheme of the universe, at least the universe where they find themselves.
On this insignificant planet, there are areas and divisions that seem fairly arbitrary but are of great significance to the planet’s people. For the sake of simplicity, let’s refer to these arbitrary areas as countries. The current count is 195 countries, with seven and a half billion people inhabiting the 195 countries.
If each country got its fair share of the planet’s people, each would have nearly 40 million citizens, but not much is fair on this planet. I won’t bore you with a list of everything that is not fair but just know that it would be much easier to catalog what is fair. That would be a tiny catalog indeed.
Hang in there with me. I’m getting to the crux of this tale. One of the 195 countries – call it USA – sprawls between two of the Planet’s oceans between two other countries: Canada and Mexico. USA has states and territories beyond these boundaries, but the only point is that it is really big and has way more than its fair share of resources and people: 327 million.
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