“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
“All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil…But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.” (Thoreau)
We all knew the system was broken; that eventually it would collapse by way of its own corruption.
Man’s first misstep was when he traded his instincts for Reason, and became blind to what is obvious to any animal by believing that facts are the sole determinant of what is real, true, or beautiful.
Because we had sublimated and substituted virtually every aspect of real happiness and peace with possessions and conformity, we eventually sensed that there was something wrong…that something was missing, but we didn’t know what it was because few of us had the slightest clue what it was, despite the plethora of clergy, elected officials, police, and various other gurus who would purport to tell us what it was we needed.
Our society was supported by an interlocking series of lies that first justified their own existence, and then so obfuscated the truth as to eclipse it, and discourage anyone from looking elsewhere for it.
The idea of questioning those lies and false values was considered esoteric and pointless. Most citizen-consumers were fearful of the consequences of independent thinking, and far too over-stimulated by passive entertainment to even consider solitary contemplation.
A man or woman can study any subject, and if when tested gives the answers deemed as correct by his mentors who are just as blind, he or she is considered educated, which means he or she is just as blind, misguided and just plain wrong as those who would judge them.
To be enlightened, if one chooses to do it by way didactic information, one must first learn it, examine it scrupulously, see the flaws and folly of it, and then decide for themselves what is true and what is truly valuable.
Even this is still only a first step.
Even our entertainment showed the effects, reflecting a cynical view of our government as being so corrupt and sinister as to defraud and mislead its citizens on a daily basis for the benefit of a privileged oligopoly or under the cloak of “national security”; that it was casually accepted and tacitly condoned, and considered entertaining rather than alarming.
The reason for the failure to act upon these injustices lay in the fact that virtually everyone was bribed by the hypnosis of consumerism, in one way or another.
The most popular theme in movies and games of that era involved some form of an apocalyptic collapse of our society.
By way of the hypnosis of television and other mass media, passive entertainment lulled them into tranquility, and promised salvation by purchasing some product to fill the empty space we dreaded to acknowledge.
In order to live genuinely and without deceit, one would have to separate themselves from the source of the deception.
The rash of Alaskan frontier television shows presented as Reality TV was the beginning of the faintest glimmer of recognition by the public that fulfillment was not likely to be found in the lap of civilization despite the Sirens of the Big Lie of proclaiming “Truth, Beauty, and Enlightenment are all well and good, but if you can just get enough power, money and influence, you can buy anything you want…”
The public was routinely bamboozled into voting for either rich and notoriously corrupt leaders or else anyone who claimed to be the champion of the downtrodden and protector of the weak; those who would vote for them a second time, even after betraying their broken promises during their fist term.
As the ranks of the mislead, misguided and ill-connected and marginally educated or literate seemed to grow exponentially they became more and more dependent upon a system that was in fact feeding on them in exchange for the most meager of existences, which worked for only so long as they all spent more than they made and willingly competed to buy ill-designed, poorly manufactured goods that they really didn’t need.
But as most of their lives amounted to equally meaningless existences, none of them knew how to do anything else, especially the work of their lives, preferring to trade their lives for money to do a job for someone else.
As an increasingly more incompetent public school system failed to provide useful learning tools and larger portions of the population grew into dysfunctional adults spawning even more useless, increasingly co-dependent citizen-consumers while the privileged classes enjoyed private schools and paid less and less taxes back to the system they were manipulating for their sole gain, it soon became clear that the system was not capable of supporting itself.
If the rich didn’t pay taxes and the poor couldn’t, the middle class was forced to carry the burden until it became clear that the national debt was becoming unmanageable.
The legislators allowed themselves to be manipulated so as to remove most of the banking and mortgage regulations that were designed to prevent the over-extension of credit that contributed to the first near-collapse of the economy.
Initially the real-estate bubble burst and then the entire market tanked and the government bailed out the banks despite the fact that it would have been cheaper to buy the houses from the banks and let the owners buy them back, rather than face foreclosure.
All those empty homes could have made it a renter’s market, but the banks chose to sit on many of them empty until they were nearly worthless due to dangerous mildew and mold damage.
And we let them do it. It was our money that the government spent to prop up the banks rather than prosecute the lenders and legislators and attorneys who were responsible for allowing the greedy regulations that created the crash.
The middle class was shouldering the bulk of these outrages, and as their ranks were culled, a second even more disastrous collapse was inevitable.
Small wonder that video and computer games devoted to the theme of a zombie apocalypse became America’s favorite genre.
Those games were a substitute for doing it yourself. Virtual visceral fantasy.
It, like pornography, allowed some individuals to escape their otherwise dystopian existence. Harmless distraction to keep you so overstimulated that you don’t start asking questions and stirring up trouble.
Once the world Banking System collapsed due to cyber-terrorism and the nearly simultaneous attacks on Fort Knox, The Chase Manhattan Bank, and the remaining members of the Federal Reserve system turning them into nuclear hazard sites, all world wealth was in the hands of those who had launched the attacks, and public confidence in our monetary system evaporated.
The Muslim coalition although united in their religion, as well as their hatred for America suffered from allegiances that were as weak as they had been since the days of Lawrence of Arabia; each tribal king expected to be autonomous and mistrusted the other tribes. That, plus their bellicose propensity for violence and long-standing feuds was as volatile as the petroleum that had made them rich.
It wasn’t long before their own nuclear weapons had turned most of the Mid-East into radioactive glass. America did not have the capacity to launch an attack until after they had turned upon each other. Similarly, as near as can be told, the Chinese, the Koreans, Pakistani, and of course Russians turned on each other and brought the world back to the stone age.
Radical Islam eventually achieved their goal of anti-art anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, anti-media, religious fanaticism. The exact details are sketchy, even now, due to the initial chaos created by the Armageddon Virus that had caused the collapse of virtually the entire internet and all of its operating systems.
Fortunately, by this point all world order and infrastructure were disabled, which put at least a temporary hiatus on global warfare.
The resulting riots, robbery, and in some cases cannibalism worldwide that resulted after losing all of any country’s national net worth, tended to limit warfare to only their next door neighbors, but not much farther.
Ironically, unlimited worldwide cyber warfare had led to more peaceful times than had been recorded in all history.
Of course, it would be temporary. It would only be a matter of time before somebody figured out how to restore some semblance of wealth, power and privilege to an even smaller select few, but the chaos created in the meantime was estimated to have reduced the world population by more than sixty percent, thereby reducing the technological, logistical and nutritional demands of the world to a bare minimum.
Other than the remaining ruling class of owners, those who survived were grateful for even the barest and most meager existences. Now virtually everyone left would be willing to ‘work for food’ and the middle class virtually disappeared, at least for those still addicted to what remained of civilization as they had known it.
The fact was that small but significant portions of America had begun to establish colonies in the most remote locations that were bound together by their mutual strengths, their knowledge, and their talents as well as their worth within their tribe.
This is where the story of Elliott, and the other members of the Fourteenth Colony begins.
Namasté
नमस्ते
Chazz Vincent
copyright © March 13th, 2021
Fish swim with the tides, in and out of the lagoon as it empties itself, receives from, and flows back into the sea.
*ALL REFERENCES TO ANY PERSONS CONFIRMED STILL LIVING IS PURELY CO-INCIDENTAL…AND THE DEAD ARE TOO BUSY LAUGHING AT US TO CARE.
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