Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the journey of Tetsuro and Maetel, as we explore a fresh episode of the fantastical Galaxy Express. Our last episode saw the pair touching down on the planet Trader, and for once enjoying the generous amenities of a modern city as they prepared for the next leg of their journey. But no glimmering facade comes without its ominous underbelly, and in Trader, the vast gulf between the haves and have-nots is expressed on every street corner, as desperate travelers beg for charity from anyone who might answer.
The threat of starvation has a way of clarifying our relationship with others, demonstrating how the civility of society is essentially another form of imprisonment, a culturally conditioned expectation that we will suffer in silence rather than disrupt the mirage that is capitalism. True scarcity pierces the veil, forcing us to act in desperate, ugly ways in order to survive, and through this desperation reveal that forms of classism or servitude based on financial relations are in truth no more civilized than the gun and the lash. It is a very convenient thing to have your inhumanity enshrined as the culturally accepted mode of exploitation, while the cries of those you’ve impoverished are at best framed as “undignified,” and likely as not criminalized altogether. All we can hope for in such desperate times is that the fire of compassion not be snuffed out by pragmatism – and in this woman he has allied with, whose poverty and kindness remind him so much of his mother, Tetsuro may have discovered another keeper of the flame. Let us return to Galaxy Express 999!