【by Paulina Campanella】

Tell me, have you ever drop-kicked an ugly baby? Whacked it so hard it hit the
stratosphere? At an angle—so it spins and spirals and twists and twirls as the heat envelopes its
tiny body like pouring water onto a cotton ball? Some people think we should leave it to the
professionals, but I disagree. It’s something everyone should do once in their life. An ugly baby
is an ugly baby, and it deserves to be treated as such.

You see, I’m an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur with a dream. And with society’s pressing
issue, regarding the allocation of ugly babies, the world needs entrepreneurs like myself to
inspire change. Ugly babies are multiplying to unforeseen forecasts, stinking up the cities with
their sewage. They are crowding everything, from tourist attractions and public benches to retail
stores and restaurants. Even the subway isn’t safe anymore, littered with screaming, skinny,
sordid babies all over the ground and on the tracks. Above ground, however, they are forming
piles so high, they are eye-level with top-floor apartments. Every day, blue-collar workers climb
ladders hundreds of feet in the air, just to skim the tops of these piles. Through their sky-scraping
windows, the Manhattan elite are seeing what the rest of the city does for the first time—and
they are not happy.

We are paying our employees overtime to discard these piles. It’s dirty work. And with
this sudden exponential increase of ugly babies, we won’t be able to hire workers fast enough to
counter the problem. As the speed of allocation decreases, public faith falls, causing investors to
panic and chaos to ensue. Pile Duty workers in Brooklyn are threatening to unionize—to strike—
which means this issue will continue to escalate until we are surrounded by ugly babies to the
point of suffocation. But this nightmare does not have to be our future. I believe that, as a public
administration, we can do better for a societal norm. I believe in more efficient and productive
practices. I believe in a solution to the ugly baby problem.

The first step is the hardest, as I’ve always said. So please, don’t worry that the first item
of my proposal is to Defund the Kickline. Noble men and women make up these forces, and I
firmly advocate for kickline opportunities for any keen citizen. However, it costs far too much
time and energy to punt each individual baby out of our lives and into orbit. Kicklines simply
aren’t BIG enough. In today’s climate of overcrowded cities, we need to conduct this work more
and faster. As an entrepreneur, my job is to innovate the good and make it great, so I consume
myself with finding a more efficient way to go about it. I’ve drafted a couple ideas for alternative
disposal methods below.

Picture this for me: a giant slingshot, 500 feet wide, made of steel, with reinforced elastic
straps supporting a container. We shovel the babies into this slingshot vessel, yank the straps
with an eighteen-wheeler, and admire the sweet release from the ground. It would certainly be
popular with the townspeople; we could charge bystanders who watch the spectacle, and it would
be a great PR move in these terribly trying times. Consider this idea an evolution of the kickline,
a Darwinistic development in an advancing society.

If you will, next imagine this: a hot air balloon, filled to the brim with ugly babies, that
never comes down. We release the structure, and it just keeps soaring up and up and up, higher
and higher, until the babies have to fend for themselves in the ozone layer. It’s a literal hands-off
operation, and should provide an even more dramatic scene than the slingshot, given the time
taken for the balloon to rise. We’ll do it near a body of water, naturally, in case the structure falls
down. (What a human disaster that would be, if a hot air balloon, burning from the heat of the
atmosphere, crashed onto an innocent town!) In this way, perhaps the slingshot, which releases
the babies with no attachments, is the more logical choice.

You may be wondering how I come up with such ideas. As an entrepreneur, I’ve learned
to keep my ears open to all future project concepts. For instance, when the Evangelists scream
that all babies deserve life, it’s hard not to tune them out. But to innovate, you cannot
discriminate—all kinds of surprising sources can inspire game-changing business plans. Their
nonsense babbling did get me thinking. All babies may not deserve life, but some babies do have
a capacity for utilization. You need to think outside the cradle, if you will. Ugly babies have
unseen potential, and I’ll show the world how to tap into it.

This is my true vision: the Baby Recycling Plan. It’s hard to see, since they’re so hard to look
at, but there are degrees of ugliness in some babies, as there are shades of beauty in cute ones. I
believe that our society can benefit from some of these ugly babies more than the current system
permits. I’ve listed a few ideas below.

I. An ugly baby boy’s rough skin would make an effective grip for baseball—a
baseball, specifically. Players won’t have to wear gloves anymore, because the
calluses of the Baby Baseballs will provide natural traction. We’ll get free advertising
from game broadcasts, and our profits will more than cover any lawsuit the leather
industry throws our way.

II. Stress levels are skyrocketing higher than the baby piles, with the current
overcrowding crisis. The current product on the market, rubber stress balls, are
unoriginal, bland, and environmental calamities. Introducing…Stress Skulls, taking
advantage of the unfused bones in ugly babies’ heads for your stress management!
It’s better for Mother Nature, and provides a fun twist to a classic product.

III. Ugly baby girls, if maintained as investments, have the greatest profit potential of any
proposal. It will be a decade before we make sales off them, but eventually, we can
rent them out for nights. We’ll need to fund clothing and maintenance, of course, but
I am certain it will sum to a profit. Then, once they’ve aged out of their purpose, they
can raise the newcomers, saving resources. With them fulfilling this role in society,
we will preserve the purity of the pretty that the administration strives to protect in
this world. And while you may doubt this particular market, I assure you, the type of
man who indulges in such pastimes likes them skinny—he won’t mind their sunken
cheeks. Furthermore, for permanent sale, if we put into account our expended effort, I
suspect we could tag them for triple the price of their more beautiful counterparts.
You’d be amazed how quickly Hollywood gets perverted—as long as you keep it
under wraps.

It goes without saying, however, that the vast majority of ugly babies are intolerably so,
and for them, we need to practice efficient disposal methods. For the select few with potential, I
must emphasize the main goal of the Baby Recycling Plan, lest you misunderstand my
intentions: to benefit from the utilization of ugly babies, while still keeping them out of normal
society. I do not want to end up at the supermarket in twenty years, facing a hideous cashier,
whose calloused hands grab my credit card and whose bony arms package my groceries. I won’t
have the stench of their ragged clothing seeping into my perishables, as though no one ever
taught them how to get to the laundromat. And those eyes—they’ve all got the same eyes.
Narrowed and cold, like they have all the knowledge of the world and its injustices, like they
think parroting the word “poverty” excuses their appearance. Staring you down like you’re the
reason they’ve gotten this ugly, like they would kill you if they were literate enough to find the
address of your home, like we don’t all have problems of our own. How could anyone buy
groceries like that?