What is the most valuable thing all privileged people own?
“Son! We are so close! I can almost taste that prize money!” screamed the father hysterically over the crackling radio. “The finish line is just around this bend! We are not going to be garbage scrappers any longer!”
“Yes Papa! shrieked the boy gleefully as he tightened his grip on the steering wheel and floored the accelerator of his battered dune buggy. The rusted and bullet-riddled vehicle roared into a higher gear and sprayed an even larger black plume of smoke behind it.
“Papa! I can’t believe Old Bessy has gotten this far in this death race!”
“I am still pinching myself, my boy! I thought Bessy was a goner when the sand kraken snatched her in the first leg of the race! But boy, oh boy, did you shock that beast, when you fired up your rocket boosters. You roasted that poor things’ tentacles until it looked like calamari!”
His father’s coarse smoker’s laugh crackled loudly over the radio.
“Dad, did you also see me while we sped through Dead Man’s Valley? Bessy nearly got clipped by one of those…”
But before the boy could complete his sentence, his Dad screamed over the radio, “Watch out, my boy! There is someone on your 6 o clock! They are hot on your heels!”
Sure enough, another desert dune buggy materialize right behind him. It was wastefully dumping all of its nitrous oxide reserves to catch up. But before the boy could retaliate, the opposing driver let out a menacing laugh and recklessly smashed his dune buggy directly into Bessy’s passenger side.
Before the boy could even recover from the collision, he saw a brand new replacement dune buggy being air dropped from the sky. The smirking driver had just paid 34,000 credits to have a track drone teleport it over. But when the boy hastily tried to request a back-up vehicle for himself, all that appeared on the drone’s screen was the heart shattering words “insufficient funds”.
Life is filled with countless potholes, hurdles, and inevitable crashes. The people who are privileged are the ones who can afford to pay for second chances. Those who aren’t privileged, live lives that are irrevocably derailed after making just one single mistake.
