Undergrown cucumbers and tomatoes were the only vegetables she could get to grow these days, but the garden was nearly free of any food. Having a garden was a risky venture but she had to feed the children. The government didn’t like private gardens.They didn’t like private water collection. She figured out long before the stores closed and the food shipments slowed that the order of the world was changing, and not for good. That’s why for a couple of years she tried saving food. Most of it was dried fruits, canned things plus a variety of beans and grains. While there wasn’t a lot of it, she managed. These days when she found time to sit and put her feet up she wondered at how she hadn’t been caught. Sometimes, they arrested people for hoarding food although hoarding was laughable. What she managed to save wouldn’t last long. Water became a battlefield. Everyone needed it. No one had enough of it, and the government controlled it.
Daily living…no, existing, was difficult now. Still, she did her best. Luckily, she was able to hang on to these three angels. Looking at their innocent little faces kept her going.
“How unfair it is to them,” she thought. Gone were the days of good friends and neighbors. It was to each his own. It had to be. Gone was the public trust. Stuck in a world where enemies existed to your left, right, behind and in front cautioned her to watch her back. But, the days of peace and having enough, she still remembered. It was the little things she missed the most. She missed that first cup of coffee on the sunny porch every morning listening to the birds sing never having to fear someone coming. But, there was no coffee.
As a child she used to get up early and walk to a honeysuckle field a couple of streets from her house. There she would pick the flowers and suck their sweet nectar. She could still smell the honeysuckle in her memories. Unhindered, she could climb up the short side of the mountain behind her friends house to where the bedrock slab jutted out over highway 64 and sit watching the cars go by. Now, there were no cars and the mountain had been decimated by the bombs. Not one tree was left on that side. Venturing to the end of the sidewalk was as far as she dared go now always keeping the children in sight. They were making the best of things possessed of the ability to make joy from the simplest of things. In their innocent play, they built funny little houses for the toy cars and dolls they still had. Listening to the adventures they created for them made her smile. Crying was something she did rarely and in private. “I’m mourning,” she told herself.
No one claims to know exactly when the destruction of civilian life was planned though there were plenty of signs throughout the 20th and 21st century. If you looked back to the first and second world wars, there were warnings. And, the good men tried to stop it. But, they were overwhelmed. We had a few leaders try to warn us. They were all assassinated. As the world moved into the second half of the millennium, freedom died. And, it died hard. No one took responsibility.
We were warned. You couldn’t deny it.
[“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” -James Madison from The Federalist Papers ]
[“Meanwhile, the former United States is established based on an ultra-liberal model, and various confrontations take place between the US and the SUSA. {Southern USA} The ultra-liberal set in the US keep urging the attack and annihilation of the SUSA…”] Excerpt from Out of the Ashes by William Johnstone, 1938-2004
(Out of the Ashes is a fictional but prophetic book, part of a series of novels, written in 1983)
[“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money”-Alexis Tocqueville]
Yes, we were warned.
What struck her the most was that while it was happening so many people believed that the riots they were encouraged to pursue were a form of justice for them. They believed that the violence they were encouraged to act out was going to improve their lives when it was all over. They thought the government was going to reward them financially and all would be right in the streets of America, moreover the world. What they didn’t see was they were the puppets doing the dirty work. They refused to see that intolerance was being used to break down tradition and unity. And, when unity was finally lost they would attempt to enslave everyone. For the individual, it was a truly terrifying time.
At the worst of the chaos came the thieves, the rapists, the killers and the haters. She did a lot of things she wasn’t proud of to survive. Prepared less than others and more than some, there were things she did to keep the monsters, those indulgent, greedy creatures that posed as men, from tearing apart what little family she had managed to save. Shuddering at the memory, she recalled the one she feared the most. He was huge. And, she wasn’t armed. He came looking for whatever he could trade and whatever he could find to satisfy every base pleasure and need. Had it not been for the baseball bat she kept behind the door he would have had his way in everything. A split second of her paying very close attention to his intentions allowed her the opportunity to swing that bat more than once. From sheer terror she did it with a strength and speed she didn’t know she was capable of. Cleaning up was the worst. But, at least they were spared…this time. She feared many more monsters to come.
Growing up, she never felt hate except the quick tempered way a child thinks they feel it for some loss of privilege or belonging. The older she got the more she watched hatred saturate the world. It was the same with racism. She wasn’t taught to be racist but that’s what the world demanded halfway through the second millennium. After watching the government turn on the military, the police and the religious, she saw them incite racism as a way to change the world pushing it into a New World Order where only those with money and no conscience could be “happy”. She had to admit she had acquired a bit of hatred herself. And, if she was being honest with herself she now viewed many people of color skeptically.
The government divided and they conquered much. Still, she hung on to this little house where little worked. She left people alone and worked to survive. In the back of her mind she wondered: “What happens when we run out of food?” She was tired. Praying helped. Lessons from childhood told her to trust in God and not be fearful of what men could do. But, the truth was that when the night came and she could hear gunshots and screams in the distance, she got scared. Men had already done so much she wasn’t sure God could envision the level of hopelessness and destruction they could do. And, it shook her faith.
Still she knew she was lucky to not have been in one of the round ups of dissenters and patriots. She wanted to be what she always had been: a simple woman complex only in thought living alongside others freely and with the convictions of a faithful soul. That seemed so simple a goal. Never would she understand how so many in the world saw that as a dreadful way of living.
“There are no more good men to rescue us,” she thought. So as she found the strength to fight, she also prayed more. She would continue to fight and pray until the nights filled with the kind of silence where crickets could sing the night away while the wind swept softly through the trees under a heavenly moonlight that only peace, and possibly death, could bring.
This is Fiction ©2015
Speaking to Common Sense 