When I was a child I was fascinated with the Aladdin story where he rubs the lamp and a genie pops out to grant him three wishes. What a gift, right? The genie just snaps his fingers and voila, wishes granted! What kid doesn’t dream up his own three wishes? A new car, a million dollars, the perfect body?
So one day during my high school years I was having a conversation with a friend and asked him what he would wish for if he had three wishes. Money, a hot girlfriend, and a kickin’ car was his answer. Then he asked me what I’d wish for and I said a million dollars, the perfect body, and 3 more wishes. ;) We played the “wishing for more wishes” game for a while until our list of things we wanted was pretty long.
But as I got on in years I began to reconsider what I would really wish for if I was ever presented with the opportunity. You have to be prepared for everything right? And if a genie ever did pop out of a lamp and offer me three wishes I wanted to be ready. Around this time I’d seen a lot of tv shows and read books about people’s wishes backfiring on them; like when the guy wishes for a million dollars so the genie kills his wife who had a million dollar life insurance policy on her. So as I thought about my wishes I wanted to make sure there would be no loop holes.
My first wish was for world peace. But then I realized it probably wouldn’t last because people would just revert to fighting again. You really have to earn world peace. So my wish was this: For 48 hours only I want the world to be in a state of total love and total peace so that when the world reverts back to its previous state after 48 hours people will have had just a taste of what could be achieved if we work really hard at this. Basically an incentive to change their ways when they could see the reward awaiting them.
My second wish was for everyone to be afflicted with a sense of conscience. I figured if people really cared about how their actions affected...