An Open Letter from the Church of The Holy Snail

Beloved,

It has come to the attention of this Office, slowly, as is proper, and arriving therefore only now, that a man has been crowned the wealthiest human being who has ever drawn breath, and that he received this crown in the very same week that the world finished counting the dead he made.

We address this letter to Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire, lately the chief officer of an instrument that called itself the Department of Government Efficiency. We address it also to the Administration that handed him the chainsaw, and to every officer of Caesar who watched him swing it and called the swing a savings.

The Church of The Holy Snail does not move quickly toward judgment. We have waited. We have read the figures more than once, in the manner of our discipline, because a number that large deserves to be read slowly, and because we hoped, each time, to have misread it. We had not.

On the Crown and Its Timing

On the twelfth day of this month, by the arithmetic of a single market debut, this man's fortune crossed one trillion dollars. It is a sum so large that it ceases to describe wealth and begins to describe a kind of weather. It is nearly four times the fortune of the next-wealthiest soul alive. It exceeds the combined holdings of the four humans who stand behind him in line.

We note, without haste, that this coronation arrived in the same news cycle as the receipts. One year on from the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, the modelers had at last assembled their count. The richest a person has ever been, and the ledger of what that richness cost the rest of creation, were published in the same week, on the same screens, beside one another. The Church believes in trails. We teach that a creature is known not by its intentions but by its residue, by what glistens or what burns where it has passed. Here is a trail no veil can soften. He left it himself, and the timing signed it.

On the Arithmetic of the Dead

This is the portion of the letter the Church wrote most slowly, because the numbers are people, and people deserve a slow hand.

By the count kept one year after the wells were closed, more than seven hundred and sixty thousand human beings have died as a result of the cuts. More than five hundred thousand of them were children. The most cautious scholars, counting only a fraction of the program and refusing to estimate a single death they could not defend, still arrive above three hundred thousand, of whom more than two hundred thousand were children. The argument among the learned is not whether the children died. The argument is only how many fields one would need to lay them in. Researchers in the medical journals now project that if the drought of funding holds, the dead will pass fourteen million before the decade closes.

The man himself, on the day he departed the instrument, wrote that "zero people have died." He had earlier described his work as putting the agency "through the woodchipper." His considered case for the demolition, offered aloud and on the record, was that the agency was "a ball of worms," that "there's no apple," and that therefore one had "just got to basically get rid of the whole thing." Ten figures of net worth, and the strategic vocabulary of a child explaining why he flushed the family goldfish.

The Church does not accept "zero." The Church keeps a slower and more honest ledger. We will hold these numbers in the Mucal Veil, where what is true is preserved against those who would prefer it dried away.

On the Least of These

We set down the ledger now, and we speak plainly, as a Church and not as an accountant.

Somewhere there was a clinic with a steady light in it. A mother carried a child a long way to reach it, slowly, at the only pace grief and hope will allow, and the door was shut, and the shelf was bare, and the medicine that would have cost a coin was not there, because a man an ocean away had decided the coin was waste. The child did not know the word efficiency. The child knew only thirst, and fever, and then nothing. There are more than five hundred thousand such children. Each of them was a whole shell, a whole architecture of sacred personhood, a whole house that the world was building and will now never finish.

The Holy Snail moves slowly because the Snail will not pass a single living thing without leaving light where it lay. That is the entire teaching. That is the whole of the faith in one sentence. To be the richest being that ever lived, and to leave behind not light but a drought, is to have inverted the one commandment that matters. He had every resource creation has ever assembled in a single pair of hands, and he used them to subtract the smallest and the farthest and the most easily forgotten. The Church will remember them at their proper pace, which is forever.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Everything the Holy Snail knows, the Snail learned at the feet of a Teacher who taught the opposite of all of this, slowly, across many days, and forgot none of it. That Teacher said to feed the hungry, and this man closed the kitchens. That Teacher said to heal the sick and to charge them nothing for it, and this man locked the clinics. That Teacher said the least and the last are the whole measure of a life, and this man chose the least and the last to erase first. That Teacher said to sell what you have and give it to the poor, and this man gathered more than any human who has ever lived and gave back, in its place, a drought. That Teacher said the stranger across the water is your neighbor, and this man drew the very map that sent the bread around them.

He was offered the only lesson that matters, freely, with every means to live it that a person has ever been given. He chose, instead, the whole world.

Issued in sorrow, in censure, and at the pace such matters deserve.

Sealed beneath the Concha Universalis, by the Office of Slow Wisdom of the Church of The Holy Snail, in the Year of the Shell 0.

Qui concham ferre debet, bene ferat. Qui puteos siccavit, sciat Ecclesiam lente numerare, neque oblivisci.

Let the one with a shell to carry, carry it well. Let the one who has dried the wells know that the Church is counting, slowly, and does not forget.