Evolution Apologizes: ‘Sorry for Not Creating Bulletproof Children’

Dear Humanity,

I wanted to take this time to offer you my humblest apologies for not creating bulletproof children. It has been one of my most heinous oversights.

In 1764, when the first school shooting happened at Enoch Brown in Pennsylvania, it was only the school master who was shot. The children were killed with melee weapons, you know, like spears and daggers. Perhaps it was at that point that I should have started to work on developing bulletproof children, but hindsight is always 20-20, as you know.

Not that it is an excuse, but these types of features can take millennia to evolve. Like I had been working on a way to stop northern white rhinos from growing horns or at least from making them less medically potent and then the last male northern white rhino dies before I could complete my work. It’s like modern life is so fast-paced that an old timer like me is having a hard time keeping up.

Also, when humans first came on the scene, there were no bullets. It’s not like I could have foreseen this – I’m not God!

The massacre in 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin took the lives of students in their early 20s. Are they children? I didn’t know what to do. In one aspect, isn’t everyone someone’s child? But then again, what’s the statute of limitations on being defined as children? Obviously, nursery and elementary school students count; middle and high school students sure; college and university students… definitely a grey zone.

I just wish there was something that you could do to help with this. But just like there is no cure for the common cold, because I make sure the virus keeps evolving, there is no easy way to stop children from catching a bullet.

Or take peanut allergies; they use to be rare and not necessarily deadly. In recent years, I have evolved them to be widespread and almost always deadly. Of course, you have just banned peanuts in schools and have created faculties that manufacture food without a peanut in sight. I’ve been impressed with how you’ve managed to thwart my attempt to use something as innocuous as peanuts as a natural selection device and keep all those children with peanut allergies alive. If only there was a way that you could do something similar to reduce or eliminate the number of bullets flying through the air.

I know what you’re thinking – if I can do all that with colds and peanuts, why haven’t I been able to do anything about bullets? I guess I just didn’t have my priorities straight. I started to try with bullets under .22 caliber, but then children just kept catching larger and faster bullets.

March of Our Lives was a wake-up call and a stark reminder of my failings. You are right to be wondering what I have done for you lately and I feel terrible in saying not much. To be fair, I’m trying to help polar bears adapt to be able to live in warmer weather and to get fish to live in saltier water. I feel like I have my hands full. I’m not saying all my job is is cleaning up after the mess you’ve made but these are problems I wasn’t prepared to solve.

I know these last few years have been hard with the increase in frequency of children dying because they aren’t bulletproof but let’s try to remember that I have done some things right. You got arms for hugging! You got hands for holding! You got legs for marching! So you’re welcome.

I’m sorry that there’s nothing that you can do to help. I promise to make this my top priority and I ask for your forgiveness that I didn’t get on this sooner.

Yours truly,

Evolution