A Smoking Ruin of an Economy

Everything about this situation was hard to believe.

Aiding in a catastrophe, all these hidden hands. He was uncertain how to proceed. There were so many elements at play. Secret intimidations. Coercion. Games. Soldiers, fallen soldiers. Men who no longer believed in what they were asked to do. A desecration, a desolation, at the heart of the state. A polity gone not just sour, but deranged. A violence that had crept through every day life. A terrible sin. A cry in the stain that was once called Australia.

Compliments of the chef.

These derangements took on tiny forms, and were nation wide. Everyone felt it. Sad, downcast eyes. Human interaction kept to a minimum, unless the truth, their sorrow, their disbelief, would creep out and have them arrested, or jumped on by the herd; their fellows in which they had phlegmatically trusted. No longer. 

They became frightened of each other. 

Frightened of the authorities. 

Frightened of the state.

Frightened to go outside. 

One officer, forced to seek out a lie, complained constantly of what a waste of time it all was.

He held a crucible in his hand; he heard them swarming through ancient forests; he knew that all, now was on the march. That these points in history were without signal achievement; that greater forces were at play. Mere instruments in a cosmic drama, they might once have said. But now these forces were better understood; and remained just as dismal in their impacts on individuals, and now on entire populations. And just as frightening in their inexplicability. And just as awful in their consequence.

If there was one truth, we would never have come in these incarnations.

As it was, those ones who had, for so many weeks extending into months simply groomed their feathers as they watched over him, or the lioness playfully biffed him as if he was a cub, or the soldiers who settled into the valley as if they were the armies of old, pre-industrial, making shift in the higher reaches, settling in to protect an old king. 

All these things were gone now. 

There was a time of extreme crisis.

There was a violent derangement on the streets. 

An entire population was being destroyed.

And those who sought, so in such a platitudinous, insincere, showy manner, to assist the dying, who served the overlords, they rapidly found themselves on the wrong side of history. 

And  the future they sought to preserve? The one they saw being destroyed in front of their eyes every single day; they were outside time, nothing that happened here could harm them, it was not a kindness they sought to do, but something more magnificent, breathing across generations, uplifting entire populations, bringing to the fore all that should have been done, and while the people surrendered to their own worst instincts, and the evil that possessed their administrations, they sought, and found, a higher beauty.