A Love Letter to the WEF

As our intrepid, hardworking, unelected leaders decamp to Davos to decide our fates, I wanted to let them know how very grateful I am for their unsolicited efforts.

Dear distinguished leaders of the World Economic Forum,

Daily I delight in humanity’s good fortune in having a volunteer organization such as yours dedicated to “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.” I mean, agendas aren’t self-assembling like the nanoparticles in Covid vaccines, so it sure is magnanimous of you to patch these benevolent programs together for us. Without ever even having been asked! Your generosity knows no bounds.

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but some ill-mannered miscreants feel your mission smacks just a teensy bit of a self-appointed, diabolical, egomaniacal, tyrannical boy’s club desperately groping for world dominance. (Or something like that.) Ingrates, all of them! Clearly, they are unaware of the four selfless pillars upon which you have built your magnificent and altruistic platform: Governance, People, Planet and Prosperity. Just like us, you value transparent, effective leadership; an emphasis on the well-being and quality of life of individuals and communities; the responsible preservation of our planet’s resources (can I get a climate change AMEN?); and the creation of sustainable economic development. I mean, just… wow. If Kumbaya and Gandhi had a baby, it would be you. I get verklempt just imagining the utopia you’re diligently engineering for us.

Did you know that these same savages genuinely believe (and I apologize in advance for the shocking nature of this ridiculous claim) that the collective you is in fact trying to enslave, impoverish, and even kill the overwhelming majority of the collective us? I know! Some days you must feel like the underappreciated parents to 7,846,000,000 thankless, cantankerous teenagers who just don’t recognize how taxing it is to dole out the tough love they need to thrive and that your unelected positions demand. I have two children myself and trust me, sometimes it gets downright ugly when I have to tell them to turn off their screens or go outside and build us an underground bunker, even though it’s for their own good. Stay strong! Your day of recognition and reward is coming!

Since I’m a writer, and you are all probably very busy waxing your skis and finalizing the list of “diverse voices” scheduled to speak at your upcoming strategy session in Switzerland (great call titling it “Rebuilding Trust,” BTW. I’ve never trusted you more than I do right now after seeing that! #chills), I thought I’d help you craft a list of all the many tireless ways you are working to ensure a bright and prosperous future for mankind. Feel free to share it on your website, blast it out on X, or include it in the conference handout materials. Let’s spread the word that the WEF is here to help in these (and surely infinitely unknown other) munificent ways:  

You made vaccinating the world your full-time jobs. Practically overnight and without even studying it on actual people, you produced an undeniably safe and incredibly effective lifesaving medication and then made it free and readily available to the farthest corners of the globe. Even when nobody on earth wanted it, you didn’t give up. You brought it to low-income countries that didn’t even know Covid existed! You schlepped it to schools, supermarkets, drugstores, hospitals, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, high school gyms, college campuses, remote African villages, and mobile clinics near and far. You helped countless lily-livered cowards overcome their silly, unfounded “vaccine hesitation” by giving them beer, donuts, cash cards, college scholarships, even free Crinkle Cut Fries from Shake Shack. No one can ever accuse you of not going to heroic lengths to make sure that giving in was easier than holding out. (Sorry about the pathetic uptake lately. I’m sure that rebuilt trust thing will right the ship in no time!)   

You took all of the frustrating guesswork out of science. Remember when just about anybody could claim to have “conducted a study” and then somebody else would call it bogus and we’d be left wondering if eggs were nature’s perfect protein powerhouse or deadly, artery-clogging cholesterol bombs? Due entirely to your diligence, we can count on a final, indisputable verdict on what is and isn’t wholesome and nutritious. And in the unlikely event you turn out to be incorrect about a few things and the alarming downturn in the average human lifespan continues, we can rest easy knowing (as John Lithgow’s 3rd Rock from the Sun character Dick Solomon said in defense of his new, unpopular chain-smoking habit) your faux pas will “take years off of the end of our lives, and those years are crappy anyway.”

You are determined to curtail our rampant consumerism. I admit it! I have a closet packed with clothes, lots of them still sporting price tags. I don’t wear all or even most of them—and I certainly don’t need to keep buying more—but I am weak-willed and cannot resist a perfectly fitted pair of low-rise jeans or a bedazzled gold halter top. And honestly, I can justify buying just about anything because “I work hard for my money,” and “I deserve it for not imagining planning issuing any bomb threats this week.” I look forward to rapidly approaching 2030, when your goal of limiting me to three new wardrobe add-ons a year will finally help me reign in my out-of-control materialism.

You’re going to help us be fiscally fit. We’re lousy with cash and you know it. We overspend it, never seem able to keep track of it, often actually lose it, and are prone to trading it for foolish things like Ferraris and Fendi bags and $17,800 face creams. Left to our own devices, we’ll spend our dough like drunken sailors in a half-price whorehouse. Just because we earned or inherited it doesn’t mean we’re going to be responsible stewards of it! Your digital currency will give us convenience, accountability, and the built-in spending limits we don’t want to admit we need. Roman philosopher Cicero said, “Frugality includes all the other virtues.” Look at you all, out there making us better, more principled people! #blessed

You want us to get to know our neighbors. We would never do this on our own, of course, but your thoughtful and crafty plan to limit our air travel to one 932-mile trip every three years will light the friendly fire under our asses we need to get cozy with the folks next door. Stuck at home over every summer, snow day, long weekend, and holiday break, we’ll have no choice but to get to know the strangers we share mailbox kiosks with. I’m calling 2033, “The Year of the Block Party!” [Note to self: save at least one clothing purchase for 2033, ‘cuz it’s gonna be lit.]  

You consolidated all the media into one convenient place. Before you declared yourselves the arbiters of truth, we bumbling half-wits had to try to figure out ourselves which of the conflicting news stories we were constantly being bombarded with was actually factual. It was exhausting! Thanks to you, we now receive a single, unified story we can trust to be true. I even made a little catch phase so I won’t forget: “If I see it on TV, consider it to be!”

That time Markie went bare-assed on the news.

You’re always thinking about others (and the environment, OFC). You selflessly fly around in your private jets, creating jobs for pilots, flight attendants, aviation mechanics, and aircraft manufacturers that simply wouldn’t exist if you hopped on a commercial flight with the proletariat. Plus, I’m sure the exorbitant fuel taxes you pay are promptly redirected into environmental initiatives to fight the many looming, unavoidable catastrophes we face due to so many of us having the audacity to exist. Finally, everyone knows that private planes are so much safer than commercial airliners—and if anything tragic were to happen to you, who would decide where we can live or how we can spend our own money or what medicines we must put in our bodies? Can you imagine if we had to sort out those things for ourselves? Because of you, that terrifying possibility is off the table.

You sprinkle glyphosate like magical fairy dust on everything. You carefully scrutinized every single nuisance plaguing the planet and the top offender stood out like a sore green thumb: Weeds! I mean, you just never know when and where those tenacious little tendrils are going to spring up, and that not-knowing keeps us all in a perpetual state of anxiety and dread. But you’ve thought this all the way through: Put weed killer on literally every single surface on Mother Earth and—boom!—pesky little problem solved. It’s a good thing you didn’t listen to the WHO in 2015 when they declared glyphosate “probably carcinogenic in humans,” or the European Chemicals Agency two years later when they classified the chemical as a toxin (*but not to specific organs, phew!) that can cause serious eye damage and instead went with the European Food Safety Authority who, thankfully, declared it perfectly safe “unlikely to be carcinogenic.” Weeds are creation’s sod squatters, and I applaud your commitment to annihilating every last one.

You’ve literally thought of everything. We all know we need to stop eating meat (TBH I’m not sure why but I am pretty sure it has to do with cow farts and ozone and I’m here for it), but have you ever had a perfectly grilled porterhouse? I have. It’s heaven. And you could have whisked these culinary indulgences away and left us longing in misery—but you didn’t. No, you’ve fabricated a frankenversion of all our favorite fleshy delights so we can keep right on stuffing our gluttonous little faces with impossibly (get it? :) tasty doppelgangers. And I sincerely cannot imagine how hard you must have worked to create a patty that tastes sort of a little bit vaguely like ground beef if you drown it in condiments but is actually made with cultured dextrose [a food additive used to inhibit bacteria and mold growth which the FDA is studying but has not officially rated as safe or not-safe], GMO soy leghemoglobin [a “small 16 kDa holoprotein expressed within the nitrogen-fixing root nodules of the soybean plant”—I’m no molecular biologist but it sounds delicious!—that may or may not be on the brink of being banned], and INS 461 [a chemical stabilizer/thickener] and INS 37b [a vegetable oil extract that supposedly prevents rancidity]. Thank GOD you landed on the perfect formula (I’m sure sales will pick up again soon!), so we won’t have to eat any more of that clean and nutritionally dense but atmospherically disastrous animal protein we carnivores crave.

You know your mouth is watering right now.

Congratulations, WEF. With nothing but a vision of the world you wanted to create and more money between you than any four continents put together—and even though none of us put you in the positions you hold or frankly can in fact work out how you got them or why anyone anywhere even listens to you at all—you’ve managed to touch nearly every life on earth.

Forever in awe,
Jenna

Seriously tho.

Haven’t picked up a copy of The War on Ivermectin yet? Do it now, before someone tells you how many books you can buy.