• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1360 0

hand to mouth, among friends and strangers. Maybe this was how people lived, no matter what. He googled to see if any studies had been done to determine how quickly new habits were internalized as a norm. Every Wednesday he went by the dead drop and found his note from the week before. It was disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to remember what Edgardo had said about that, and trust that he had been conveying to him the actual facts of the situation, rather than merely speculating. He had made it clear enough. Time to refocus on the moment. Ride the wave.

CUT TO THE CHASE

Response to response 4:

Yes, I suppose it was hard to talk about, because it seemed like it broke down in one of two ways, because people were asking: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:

If it isn’t too late, we don’t have to do anything.

On the other hand, if it is too late, we don’t have to do anything.

So either way, don’t do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem or a question put the wrong way, because there was never going to be a too late. It was always going to stay a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking.

Response to Response 5,692:

Because there was no liberal media bias, that’s why! That was all a myth. The rules of capitalism favor size and the economies of scale, and so the big corporations, following all relevant legal opportunities, bought up all the mainstream media. Then the message went out coordinated by constant feedback and dialogue using only a certain limited vocabulary and logic, all within a kind of groupthink, until all the media said the same thing: buy things! This moment in history is a good one and will last forever! Nothing can change, so buy things.

But then this weather thing came along. It put the lie to the reality we believed in. So that all began to look a little fishy.

Response to Response 1 to Response to Response 5,692:

Lots of reporters are young, and so they’re locked into an Oedipal hatred of the baby-boomer generation. They hated the boomers for what we were given when we were young, the world gone for just the briefest moment out of its mind into a realm of sex drugs and rock and roll, of revolution and war and history right there in our hands, a time of excess and joy, a feeling that things could still change—a freedom that was so extreme no one who was there can even remember it properly, and no one who wasn’t there can imagine it, because it was before AIDS and crack and meth and terrorism had returned everything to something like the weird and violent Victorian repression/transgression state of fear that we’ve all been living in these past years. So I see a fair bit of resentment. You old Vietnam vet, I see their eyes saying, you old hippie, you got lucky and were born in the right little window and got to grab all the surplus of happiness that history ever produced, and you blew it, you stood around and did nothing while the right reaganed back into power and shut down all possibility of change for an entire generation, you blew it in a ten-year party and staggered off stoned and complicit. You neither learned to do machine politics nor dismantled the machine. Not one of you imagined what had to be done. And so the backlash came down, the reactionary power structure, stronger than ever. And now we’re the ones who have to pay the price for that. You can see why there might be a little resentment.

Okay—say we did. Well, no wonder. We didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have the slightest idea. There was no model to follow, we were out in the vacuum of a new reality, blowing it and then crashing back to Earth—it was a crazy time. It went by too fast. We didn’t really get it until later, what we needed to do. Where the power was, and how we could use it, and why it was important to spread it around better.

So.