INCANDESCENT

A mark on his head. He no longer understood the means of communication.

He knew they had called before he picked up the phone. How was that possible?

Well how was much that was happening possible? Really?

Far out to sea. High above. Around the corner.

I'm going to adopt this one out.

You'd better get used to it.

I could kick myself.

We could all do that.

How could they see what he was seeing, read what he was reading?

How had the technology advanced this far this quickly?

Millions of calculations, all day, every day, the super-minds at work.

There's debate on this side of the divide as well.

My sentiments exactly.

+++

Il Duce was incandescent with rage as he watched the reins of power run through his hands. He could not order the public to love him, as much as he would like to.

Mad, bad and sad. This ill fated government on the march to a communist state.

They were crawling out of the eves. They were listening now. They could be heard across the reaches and through the wires. Mad, bad and sad.

An agent is about to go rogue, he warned. A long term hater. A nasty piece of work.

There was nothing people liked less than being caught out in a lie.Variations of the phrase ran through his head as he travelled north.

Already, as predicted, the gay marriage debate was running out of control.

It was poisonous, putrid and entirely dishonest politics.

Toying with the feelings of the country’s sexual minorities.

Exposing them to the death squads.

Already Kevin Rudd’s godson had been bashed for standing up for gay marriage.

Skuffles were breaking out, online, in the real world.

An ill fated combination of sharia and communism was coming, and those in power did not have the decency to warn the people.

Everything about this government was subterfuge. Extreme levels of dishonesty.

Others were being ridiculed, ostracised and abused for standing up for traditional, heterosexual marriage.

The ballooning, multi billion dollar foster industry, stealing children for profit from sometimes troubled families, was slathering lips at the bonanza to come. Taking children off heterosexuals to give to lesbian and gay couples. As simple and as straight forward as that.

Karl Marx’s destruction of the family come true at last.  

Already, in an afternoon, the parliament had passed legislation abrogating freedom of speech under the guise of protecting tolerance.

The diversity queens were the greatest hate mongers.

They could foment the public space with dire privilege over an emotional and ideological charged debate about sexual identity, but withdraw freedoms in a matter of hours.

That’d be right.

The threat is from within, he warned the agencies. Military trained operatives. Bitter, hate-filled, sub-human, well, let’s face it, some of your colleagues are gronks.

He had been warned off the dark web and bitcoin, although he had no purpose beyond observer. The authorities were all over it. Nothing was worth the risk. There was no truth in the shadow lands. The peoples had been disarmed. What happens when the only ones with guns are the authorities?

And the government turns bad?

He shrugged. He wished they were on his side. Perhaps they were, some of them.

The silent resistance.

You don’t think we live in a democracy, do you?

Of course not.

A clarion call. A nightmare scenario. A terrible confluence of circumstance.

That was the end of 2017.

A people destroyed. A culture extinguished. A once positive, enterprising country flushed down the toilet.

Old Alex read the daily comic books aka the newspapers with disbelief, they were so thin, so badly written, so excised of judgement. So poorly argued. As appealing as an exhumed corpse.

The Fourth Estate had collapsed in meaning, independence, quality. A handmaiden to the country’s own demise. He raised a coffee to his lips. And shivered in the cold of early Spring.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The godson of former prime minister Kevin Rudd has allegedly been assaulted in Brisbane by a man who was tearing down rainbow flags put up in support of same-sex marriage.
Mr Rudd tweeted a photo of his godson Sean with a noticeable gash on his forehead, saying he had been punched in the suburb of Bulimba.
"So many warnings to Turnbull about what the postal vote cld unleash. Now my godson Sean has been punched standing up for #MarriageEquality," Mr Rudd tweeted.
Bulimba 4 Marriage Equality — a group of Brisbane-based supporters of same-sex marriage — said on its Facebook page that its flags had been ripped down from a roundabout on Oxford Street.

Malcolm Turnbull is facing a deepening divide within the Liberal Party over same-sex marriage after John Howard ratcheted up his criticisms of the government, accusing it of “washing its hands” of any responsibility to protect parental rights, free speech and religious freedoms. Mr Howard said it was an ­abrogation of responsibility and “disingenuous” for the government not to address the “legitimate concerns” of Australians about the legal protections that were needed to accompany same-sex marriage.
The former prime minister warned that in the face of these concerns the government response had been to “wash its hands of any responsibility”. He said existing protections for religious institutions were under assault and could be further unpicked by a future Labor government.
John Howard has called out the great fraud of the same-sex marriage vote.
This is about far bigger issues than just changes to marriage law, with religious freedoms being put at risk by an irresponsible political class.