We've known for well-too-long. We all just assumed someone would pick up the slack.
The plebes–ordained impotent–petitioned the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats tossed it to the financiers and the financiers raffled it to the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs ran circles around the financiers, hoping the philanthropists would pick up the slack, and the philanthropists bestowed it to the plebes.
We wouldn't see the through-lines. We felt them, stochastic, reverberant, but refused to pin them down. The excess–an anomaly, a trend, a stress, a taboo. It's not as if we were unaware. No, we were well aware. We knew the stakes. We just figured it'd be dealt with. We've abdicated and abrogated and abnegated and, well, isn't it over by now?
But it's not over. It's not over, and we know it's not over. We have to tell ourselves it's over, because if we dare to think it isn't, then we have to change. And it can't be just one of us. There's no child from Omelas and no Christ on the cross. Just a furthering malaise that no one can bear. But the market fulfills the masses, and the masses meld to the market. So, who's to blame?
We're to blame, of course. Well, not equally. But, in a way, somewhat? Well, even then, no. Everyone responsible is either too moneyed to feel or too abstracted to pin. So can we punish? Can we hate? Can we scream along the sawed trees, cry into the acid ocean, hack up a lungful of lingering smog? You can, but what does it do? There's just another waiting, none irreplaceable. The heavenly mandate is maintenance.
Maintenance forever and calcified. We reupholster the bodies of our dead and play house with their meat puppets. We serve a vision marketed to our ancestors by decomposing bones. We bury ourselves alive along with them and suffocate. All who cry out are snuffed summarily. So we go, and we go, and we go.
And now we are here, on a conveyor belt to Abaddon. The lever has been disseminated out of sight. The ferryman takes trips by the dozen. We face Death yet refuse to address the Reaper. Our directive is eternal and inert. We drift on the white-water and drag the anchor with us. The now died decades ago. We don its corpse to the masquerade for one last waltz.
In the end, we're not having fun. But someone else might be. Someone else might be.
The death itself will not be quiet. We are all walking towards it blindly and not talking about it, but once it comes it will be deafening. Unignorable.
Currently everyone in town is stacking TNT in the town center. They are convinced the TNT isnt explosive, and refuse to stop no matter what is said. They even use violence against anyone who demands the TNT pile stop growing. Now the few people in town who know TNT explodes have 2 choices. They can do nothing and let the townspeople keep stacking TNT and just try not to think about the ever growing pile. Or they can set it off. Proving once and for all that TNT is explosive and maybe some of the town will survive the explosion and learn their lesson. Although they may also just start a new pile.
