TO: OMNILERT

CC: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

To the fine profiteers at Omnilert, whose software recently declared war on a bag of Doritos and then outsourced the consequences to eight police cruisers and a terrified teenager,

I write to you today with a proposal that could finally match your ambitions, your appetite, and your unearned confidence. You’ve already mastered the art of monetizing hysteria by teaching school districts that their cameras can hallucinate threats more efficiently than an understaffed vice principal. You’ve proven that your software will boldly identify anything — snacks, shadows, lunch bags, possibly squirrels — as battlefield hardware, just so administrators can sleep at night and say they “invested in safety.” In a saner nation this would have ended your product line, but this is America in the Dumb Millennium, where failure is just pre-revenue momentum.

So let’s stop pretending your system protects anyone from anything and instead embrace the only market where your talents genuinely shine: junk-food panic. There is a man in Washington right now who lives and breathes that hysteria — HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Snack Czar of the Republic — and you should call him immediately. If your software already thinks Doritos are deadly weapons, then why waste that gift on policing? Aim higher. Pitch RFK Jr. on a national program to use your hallucination-happy camera system to hunt down Cool Ranch insurgents in cafeterias, vape-pen pastry smugglers in hallways, and rogue Mountain Dew militants rotting America one pancreas at a time. Tell him you’ve invented the future of “nutrition surveillance technology” and watch the man levitate with kale-drunk excitement. If you sell it right, he’ll hold a press conference announcing the dawn of a new era where Omnilert prevents the spread of Nacho Cheese Extremism in America’s youth — an era medical researchers will one day refer to as “The Dark Stupid Age.”

The beauty of this pitch is that it makes everyone richer and dumber at the same time. School districts will sprint to buy Snack Detection Systems so they can brag about “wellness partnerships” instead of fixing a single meaningful thing. RFK Jr. gets to pound the lectern about saving children from “processed assassins in crinkly foil disguises.” You get to rehabilitate your brand by pretending the Doritos incident wasn’t a humiliating malfunction but the birth of a visionary product. And when parents inevitably ask why an eighth grader was zip-tied for possessing a Honey Bun, you can fold your arms, look solemn, and say you are simply “protecting our nation’s future.” This country loves nothing more than moral panic dressed up as innovation, and you are standing on a gold mine made of cheese dust and gullibility.

So pick up the phone, Omnilert. Call RFK Jr. Seal your legacy. If your software is going to hallucinate danger, then let it hallucinate for profit, for wellness, for America. And please, for your own sake, lean all the way in. Don’t apologize, don’t backpedal, don’t pretend you can actually identify a firearm. Announce to the nation that the real war isn’t against guns — it’s against snacks. You might just become the most unintentionally successful company in the country.

Sincerely and incredulously,
Rook T. Winchester
Closer to the Edge

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