Redemption Day (A science fiction short story)

 

Most people now call it Redemption Day, that moment when the entirety of the human species experienced something that defied all rational and scientific explanation. Nothing about that day makes any sense but what everyone remembers is that at 5:17pm EST on June 2nd of 2026 Jerusalem, Tehran, and seven other cities in the Middle East were hit with a nuclear attack.

At that very moment, I was in my kitchen washing dishes and listening to the live news feed on my cell phone. The talking heads doing their usual banal analysis speaking a lot of words but never saying anything significant. That’s when I heard the host scream and everything fell apart. 

The conflict that would engulf the region in nuclear fire started just like all the others in the past. Irrational ancient hatreds combined with current geopolitical “realities” had once again boiled over with the usual result of innocent civilians suffering. This time though instead of cooler heads forcing a ceasefire there was an accident at some level of the chain of command. Jerusalem and Tehran got nuked with the other cities following within minutes after. 

What side pushed the button first? The simplest answer is that no one really knows. Both Israel and Iran had been on hair trigger alert for decades. Their jets and missiles ready for launch at the first hint the other side was about to attack. But after years of searching blasted command bunkers and the ruins of radioactive cities, whatever record that existed as to who gave the order is now dust. 

Where things got weird was that at 5:18 something happened that was instantaneous no matter what part of the planet you lived on. When reality began working again it was 5:19pm on the same day with everyone finding themselves exactly where they were when the news was announced. 

The problem being that while no one had any memories of events after the attacks, the entire human race somehow knew over five years had passed. Millions around the world were unable to reconcile the reality of the days that followed June 2nd to what subconsciously they knew to be completely wrong. The reality was broken but humanity had to logical way to explain what happened.   

The worst of the panic eventually subsided, with most realizing that while something with reality had gone fundamentally wrong, life still had to go on. Especially since nine cities from Israel to Iran were still burning with millions dead and untold millions more to follow. National governments that at 5:17 were seconds away from launching their own nuclear arsenals stood down and began organizing rescue and relief efforts.

It was a drastic and for once welcome change in human behavior. But few had the opportunity to dwell on the sudden move away from global nuclear Armageddon because much of the Middle East was now radioactive molten glass. More than a year would pass before there was the barest attempt to understand Redemption Day.           

Of course, the three main monotheistic religions were quick to claim that it was their god that reset the world. That “He” was not ready for the world to end. But strangely enough, there was none of the insane, rigid certainty that usually dominated the more extreme members of the three. It was as if nearly all of their followers were suffering from a collective shock. Guilt probably played a part in their willingness to abandon notions of jihad or crusades. 

The big three had each instigated centuries of conflict that ultimately lead to the nuclear exchange. But the main reason all three went silent was the purely instinctive knowledge that something much worse had occurred and that over five years had passed before the “reset”.

That left explanations for Redemption Day to others who offered up answers that satisfied none.       

For years some had speculated that our universe could be explained as an unbelievably complex simulation on a god-like computer. That an entity or entities managing the simulation didn’t want our world to be destroyed. Of course many asked the question as to why wouldn’t such all powerful programmers push the reset back before the first two cities were destroyed?

Hundreds of others proposed their own ideas as to what happened. But they all lacked any supporting evidence. But most didn’t dwell long on finding a reason, the level of destruction was just too great. This situation began to change at 8:21am EST on October 15th, 2031. 

Within a few days of the 15th there were reports began flooding in that people around the world were now suffering from horrific dreams of events that took place between 2026 and 2031. 

No one wanted to call them memories, first because no one had a clear and total recollection of those missing years. But secondly, and the most important was that in reality none of those events and actions had ever taken place. 

The dreams all had one central feature. That minutes after the mushroom clouds erupted in the Middle East the major powers launched their strategic arsenals resulting in a global holocaust. The common factor in all of these dreams were individuals trying to survive in a nightmare world where humans had abandoned any pretense of rational and moral behavior. 

As the dreams continued numerous people committed suicide. They left notes confessing to crimes they knew they didn’t commit but were unable to deal with the guilt and shame they felt because of them. The strangest reactions came from those that weren’t suffering from the nightmares. While millions around the world had some sense of a long period of missing time, those not suffering from the graphic nightmares were mostly unaffected by the perceived reboot of reality. 

The overall situation took another surreal turn when people began to encounter someone in real life they knew from those bizarre dreams. Total strangers would see each other and feel a surge of joy and relief at being reunited with a lost loved one. While others might see an individual and suddenly lash out in bloody revenge for atrocities that happened during that missing time. 

It was a mass mental health crisis unlike anything the human race had ever endured. The only good thing was that as the weeks and months passed these events began to fade. Almost as if the subconscious feelings the dreams provoked were being overwhelmed and washed away by real memories. As fast as the crisis began people set about trying to try and move on with their lives. The explanation that those affected did their best to accept was that the missing time was just a symptom of global hysteria brought on by the nuclear exchange on June 2nd. 

I am happy for those people who in some way can sweep away or ignore their dreams. Because while I don’t remember everything that happened during those missing years, I clearly remember enough to truly understand how bad things got. The phrase “the living will envy the dead” was a sick and twisted understatement to what the survivors endured. 

Where I begin to question my sanity though is that I clearly remember who triggered the reset. It was me, I reset the world. How out of all the weary, sick, and tortured inhabitants of a ruined world I came into the position to give our sorry species a second chance, I don’t remember.

Where things become crystal clear though is that I was part of a group trying to get to some facility in Utah. The sky was grey and while it was midday, there was barely enough light to see. Dressed in salvaged coats and rags, the October cold didn’t seem to have any effect on us. We were all hungry, our bodies covered in sores and burns. We looked more like walking skeletons than living beings. 

While I can’t remember names, the group I belonged to would have died for each other. We had a goal, a reason to continue living while many of the survivors we encountered would just lay down and die. The one hope of those desperate to die was for their nightmarish lives to end before the wild dogs or feral humans reached them.

Somehow a woman in the group, her head bald from radiation and a long, unhealed scar down the left side of her face, found the energy to joke that we had to be the very last living humans on Earth that held some hope for a better tomorrow. Not one of us offered any response, humor was such an alien concept by then it was almost like she was speaking a long dead language.

A short time later a guy in our group collapsed to the ground. I saw him make an effort once to get back up but failed. I had to step over my fallen colleague to get past him. I saw that he was fully conscious but his body had reached his limit. He just gave up and was totally silent as we left him behind.

The terrain we had to cross to reach our goal was harsh before the holocaust. A bleak desert where mostly long haul truckers traveled moving goods east and west. A few scattered towns could be found along the way, their chief reason for existence being the truck stops that offered rest and refueling to tired drivers.

At that moment during the missing time black radioactive soot fell from the sky. We all knew that mixed in that ash were the remains of millions of people who had been incinerated in the nuclear blasts. During our journey in this hellscape, I remember we would see huge piles of bones, all picked clean. It was the ultimate symbol in the fall and disgrace of the human race.

While civilization was utterly destroyed the day of the holocaust, humans were still social animals that needed the minimum of food and water to survive. Barely a month after the nukes fell and while fallout still rained down, the feral groups began to appear.

They moved like wolf packs devouring any supplies they found and when they were exhausted, they became cannibals. Any survivors they encountered would be consumed. Of course, the ferals were male-dominated and attractive and uninjured women would sometimes be offered membership in the group. But unless a male had a critical skill the group could use, all husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers would end up cooked up on an open spit. There were absolutely no exceptions when it came to children.

Somehow my group made it to the facility we were trying to find. That morning the group was down to three individuals, and none of us had more than a day left before we would succumb to all the conditions brought on by the holocaust.

The fence surrounding the facility had already been thankfully torn down. We would not have been able to climb over what had been a ten-foot fence topped with razor wire. Crossing over it, I happened to glance down and see a sign that said something about it being an agricultural research station.

Somehow we knew which of the twenty or so cinder block buildings was our goal. Like some adventure movie, we walked into one of them finding a door leading down to a tunnel. My companions and I at this point did something very dangerous, we began to entertain hope.

The underground complex we found was a maze and it took hours searching for something that was supposed to save the world. The two others in my group, exhausted and by now delirious, found medical stretchers in a lab, crawled on top of them and went to sleep. They both promised me they would begin searching again after a period of rest. We all knew that was a lie, they would never leave that lab.

I have no idea what pushed me, but I continued still not having any idea what I was looking for. Through the exhaustion and despair, I had enough energy to feel like an utter fool. The world had ended and humanity was on the fast track to extinction. And here I was spending my last few hours of life and a post-doomsday wild goose chase.

About to give up, that’s when I felt the vibration. The complex still had enough power to provide emergency lighting so I pushed deeper into the maze. Curiosity and that spark of stupid hope giving me the will not to fall to the concrete floor and die. The tunnels were actually warm, so much that I had to shed my coat and some of the rags I was wearing.

I traced the vibration to another room, clearly a laboratory filled with complex devices that defied any explanation. In the center of that room was a square glass display case with what looked like a metal sphere about the size of a volleyball floating in the middle of the cube. Traces of light ran along the surface of the sphere. The patterns looking similar to blood vessels on the human body. Which I somehow knew to be signs of conscious thought. I also knew deep down that this thing was scanning my mind.

It saw all the horrendous things I had done in the five years since the holocaust. Shame and guilt had died that day with me determined to live, but I felt those emotions again. As this happened I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the display case glass. My face was scared, and under the remaining rags I wore I saw tattoo marks on my arm. They were marks that ferals wore to signify the number of people they had butchered for their group. I saw at least thirty, and somehow even now I remember the faces of each of those men, women, and children.

What I don’t remember is what caused me to abandon the cannibals and join the group looking for the facility. Because if you became a feral, they would never let you leave. Those that tried ended up on the spit. Few ever attempted because by the time a person became a feral they had become so debased that the bloody rituals and abandonment of individual thought and reason was a welcome release from the waking nightmare.

But the strange artifact forgave me. It told me that it was almost as old as the universe itself and that human barbarity, while terrible, couldn't compare to what it had seen over the eons. And in a way that surpassed all the other bizarre and unspeakable events since June 2nd in that reality, the sphere sang to me. The music was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced. No human could ever create something so profound. The sphere could have been an angel for all I knew.

For most of my life I had never believed in a human soul. But as the sphere roamed around in the dark and terrible places in my mind, it found the broken pieces and stitched them back together.

With my mind and spirit somewhat mended, I began begging the sphere to help humanity. The thought was barely formed when I found myself back home knowing it was 5:19pm EST on June 2nd, 2026.

I was laying on my kitchen floor listening to the people on the news feed now asking each other what the hell happened. News of the nuclear exchange now superseded by something exponentially stranger.

The thing that scared me the most was that my body felt normal. I rushed to the bathroom to look in the mirror and all I saw was a person healthy with no scars or burns. The memories of the missing time were fading fast with the pieces not returning until October. But before they left completely, I looked down at my right forearm expecting to see something that somehow would make me a monster. 

I can’t describe the feeling of looking down at my forearm, and as expected, finding nothing.

Epilogue:

Ten years have passed since Redemption Day, and despite everything the human race endured and experienced, the world is again slowly moving back towards the nuclear abyss. It’s human nature I guess, we’re a fatally flawed species that on some level wants extinction.

I never offered my story to any of the chroniclers that universities and governments dispatched to try and figure out what happened. Frankly, there are already Missing Time Deniers who say the dreams were nothing but a global mass hysteria brought on by the nuclear war between Israel and Iran.

I also went into hiding after reading stories about individuals seeing someone from their missing time dreams and taking revenge. The faces of the thirty individuals I slaughtered while I was a feral have never left me. Call me a coward and self-serving, but I was the reason the world reset and was given a second chance. I want to enjoy the life I have because I understand how badly things can get.

But curiosity did eventually get the best of me, and I traveled to the site where the sphere was kept. I wanted to see if I felt its presence. You dear reader can’t imagine my surprise having arrived at the exact site where the station existed in the missing time and finding nothing. There was nothing to suggest that any facility or building ever existed on that site. For as far as my eyes could see it was all flat, empty desert.

That brings me to the sphere itself. What was it? Alien being or alien device? Or did the sphere come from someplace other than the universe we understand. The one thing I know for certain, it was not of human origin. The music it sang to me to restore my humanity could never have been produced by us naked, insane primates. What then? Supernatural, I have no idea. 

The one thing I’m sure of is that it is gone and if humans have a second holocaust we’ll be completely on our own.

It Has Come to This

 Since 2005 when I retired from the National Guard I had no desire to touch a weapon again. While I was at best an average soldier for both my active duty time and the long boring but often frustrating years as a weekend warrior, I had been long ready to turn my attention to other more constructive interests. 

Not that I opposed private citizens owning firearms as long as they were, in my opinion, reasonable. And what I considered reasonable during this period was anything from an AR-15 downward to hunting rifles, shotguns, to whatever handgun a person fancied. 

Don’t jump down my throat, my beliefs at that time had been shaped by my military service and the 1980’s movie culture which portrayed a true man by how big a weapon he could field. For me personally, my new fixation revolved around scuba diving and surfing, even though I was absolutely pathetic at trying to ride a wave.

I kept this attitude until the mass murder of small children at Sandy Hook Elementary. Seeing and hearing the reports of that nightmare I was disgusted with my years of indifference. A total of twenty-six people were killed in cold blood by a disturbed individual because the shooter’s idiot mother had an indifferent attitude when it came to accountability for the killing machine she owned. 

In a weird way I felt dirty for my nonchalance when it came not only to civilian ownership of AR-15’s but semiautomatic pistols being owned by people who had never trained with such devices. For that reason I turned almost completely against civilians owning such weapons. I personally couldn’t fathom a reason why I would ever own anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife, that was until recently. 

Having lived and interacted with numerous obnoxious assholes steeped in the now cult-like status of gun culture, I kept my anti-gun beliefs to myself. I’m not an activist and in fact I would suck at trying to convince anyone it was raining outside even if I walked into a building soaking wet. But not sharing my “radical” views allowed me to listen to the true feelings and beliefs of those who lived and dreamed for the chance of using their version of the precious on whomever was their perceived boogeyman.

You would think Trump winning the 2024 election would have calmed the hyperactive blood lust of his supporters. Controlling every branch of the federal government should have by all rights made them giddy by being able to own the “libs.” 

But no, they’re still just as angry and disturbed as if Vice President Harris had won in a landslide and began picking every BLM, Antifa, LGBTQ+ and capitalism-hating activist she could find to her cabinet. Right-wing media is still buzzing with how Trump is going to seek revenge and retribution on all the radical left, “enemy within” individuals who in their deranged minds have destroyed the imagined country the United States once was but never existed in reality. 

Once again, when you keep your mouth shut and listen you hear shit that would scare any sane person. So I find myself in a curious position, do I stay quiet and try to ignore the country sliding closer to 1933 Germany or do I take some minimal action to protect myself. 

Last Wednesday afternoon, I went out to a local gun shop and purchased a Springfield Echelon 9mm pistol. I thought handling a weapon would be like riding a bike. But devoid of any ammo, that mass of metal and carbon fiber felt alien in my hand. 

I’m going to get someone at the gun shop to give me some retraining on safely handling the weapon. I know it will quickly come back to me, but I absolutely hate that idea.

We Are Truly Approaching Doomsday

 

Unless you entertain the idea that the election was hacked in some way, a majority of Americans willingly voted last Tuesday for someone who to an objective person has absolutely no redeeming qualities. Having grown up being taught that Americans were an exceptional people- all that “land of the free home of the brave” shit it’s difficult to understand what went wrong.

Yes, I know, America’s hands have been bloody for over five-hundred years. Our crimes against humanity are numerous but there was always some tangible attempt to change our ways, to try and make the words in the Constitution actually have some meaning. That has now changed and I fear any hope of redemption in my remaining years is impossible. Shit, since Wednesday morning the thought has crossed my mind several times that this country might not be worth saving.   

This national failure has many fathers, so trying to pin the blame on one person or event is a futile endeavor. My personal historical pivot point that most likely damned this country was back in the 90s when whatever person, group, or country saved Trump from total bankruptcy.  

But Trump is just the result of ignorance, long held fears, unrepentant prejudice and a type of privileged selfishness that is exclusive to the American character. All those factors have led to the disaster that has already begun but will get exponentially worse after Trump takes office in January.

A few brave souls have already begun to crawl out of the rubble that was Election Night and begin the process of figuring out what went wrong. As of today all I’m hearing is a lot of finger pointing with the different groups under the Democratic Party banner blaming each other.

Yes, I agree in general that my fellow Democrats failed on several levels. President Biden, a standup guy with decades of honorable service should have realized he was too old. I personally feel Democrats have since Clinton been fighting a losing battle on getting their message heard by people other than college educated types. And along with that Democrats, rightly or wrongly, have alienated their traditional base by trying to be everything to everyone. Do not ask me how they begin to thread that needle without pissing off another member of the coalition.

If Democrats have one fatal flaw is that the party is often held hostage by some group who threatens to stay home, or vote Republican if their demands aren’t met fast enough. Back during Obama’s first term, he wasn’t in office for six months when the environmentalists, Hispanics, and anti-war crowd were upset that he hadn’t addressed their issues enough.

I remember yelling at the television screaming at whatever self-righteous talking head was on MSNBC whining that his and her group felt betrayed. I mean the man was trying to clean up the financial clusterfuck that began under W. Bush. 

But all that is ancient history now. In the present we have Trump who numerous times over the course of the campaign promised to unleash the military on peaceful protesters. Execute Liz Cheney and General Mark Milliey along with many other threats that I’m largely numb to the idea of the United States becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. Oh yes, my favorite and most chilling threat is Trump talking about the “enemy within.” A blanket term that given his apparent beliefs covers anyone who disagrees with whatever he says at that given moment. 

How do we navigate this mess? I haven’t a clue but the one thing I’m sure of is that the country is fucked. Because Trump has tasted power and will have no one reigning in his worst impulses after January, it's time to prepare for the worst.

I honestly do not see a way out of this mess without the blood of Americans being spilled.

 See you in the enemy within reeducation/interment camps.

Making an Appearance

 Yes, I’m still alive and yes, I have somehow found a way to stay out of the hospital. In fact my wife and I back in September were able to have a week-long vacation down at Hilton Head Island. It was the first time I had visited the coast in maybe eighteen months where I wasn’t going to see one of my cardiologists or be admitted to the hospital.

Given that I am still on the heart transplant list my health is disgustingly good. No noticeable arrhythmias and the transplant team have reduced my trips down to Charleston for a right heart catheterization from every three months to once a year.

Right heart catheterizations determine how badly a patient’s heart is failing. In simple terms, my cardiomyopathy is insignificant, as long as I continue to take my medicine.

So right now I am stuck in a holding pattern. My dormant underlying condition continues to be the faulty electrical system in my heart. And to put it mildly my heart is a bomb that my faulty genetics will with absolute certainty detonate at some point.   

The thing that irritates me greatly is that I have less free time now than when my kids were little. Mainly it’s management at my job that keeps adding duties to the group I work with without even considering hiring any new people. In fact, we’ve had several people in my group retire over the last couple of years and have another who leaves sometime in November.

Now throw in yard maintenance along assorted repairs to the home on the weekend and I haven’t had any interest in trying to write. Well, that's not quite true. I wrote an eleven page story dealing with the breakup of a marriage that I published on Reddit. It got numerous good reviews and upvotes but I doubt I’ll share it here.

The story deals with extremely sensitive topics, far more than the fiction I have posted here, and I find the idea of posting on Blogspot uncomfortable, maybe even embarrassing.

So that’s the update. My much neglected blog is still alive and with my front and backyard going dormant for a couple of months I’ll try to post more frequently.  

 So I'll be back sooner rather than later.  

The Galactic Version of Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

 

According to the universally accepted scientific evidence the universe is around 13.7 billions years old. A number that humans can only barely understand. Given what we know now, it all began with one infinitely dense and infinitely small singularity that for reasons still not understood suddenly began to expand. 

Well, more accurately I believe the space itself began expanding. I’ve just recently come to understand the term, “Big Bang” was coined by a critic of the theory. He still thought the most likely explanation of the universe was the “Steady State Theory.” That the universe had always existed, I’m still fuzzy on how the most basic building block of the universe, hydrogen was supposed to be replenished during these countless epochs. When you have gravity pulling the hydrogen together to form stars, which then spend millions to billions of years fusing it to make heavier elements you eventually would run out. 

From what I understand, at the beginning the Big Bang universe was much too hot for actual atoms of hydrogen to form. You had a blizzard of subatomic particles churning around waiting for the temperature to cool. Once the universe did cool down basic hydrogen, and apparently a small amount of helium, formed with gravity beginning to pull it together to form stars and galaxies. 

The first generation of stars were monsters in size. With no heavier elements to mediate fusion they lived hot and short lives. They fused hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, and many others. When these first generation stars died they seeded the space around them with these heavier elements.

A couple of billion years later enough heavier elements have been created to produce the first terrestrial worlds. Although, the massive, short-lived stars that first produced the heavier elements still make up a significant portion of the stellar population. 

But on some of these terrestrial worlds the conditions were just right to allow life to emerge. As time passed the life on some of these worlds evolved to become complex multicellular creatures. On yet a smaller number of these worlds intelligent life arose and driven by curiosity and need, built a technical civilization to make their lives better.

The problem many of these first alien civilizations had to contend with makes our existential fear seem small. During that era of a still young universe the number of the hot and short lived stars was much higher. Having a sufficiently large stellar neighbor go supernova, even several lightyears away, would sterilize any world in the path of the radiation shockwave. 

Now imagine an alien civilization stumbling through its own version of the 20th century dealing with all the stunning advancements in science and knowledge of the universe. In our own world it wasn’t until 1929 that American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. Not only that, but it was Hubble who came to understand that what were called “spiral nebulae” were actually galaxies and that they were “island universes.”

Not to get too deep in the weeds, but during the Steady State era of the universe it was accepted that the Milky Way galaxy was the universe.

It boggles the mind to think of early alien civilizations struggling to learn their place in the universe, only to discover that one of their massive stellar neighbors is about to go supernova. That all life, except what lives in the deepest, darkest regions of that world’s ocean, will be erased. That in just a few thousands years all the monuments created by that intelligent species will turn to dust, leaving no trace of who they were.

Never realized that the word “Oblivion” could be so terrifying. 

For us humans, we’ve mapped our stellar neighborhood and we do not have any of those types of massive stars anywhere near us. There is the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, which is between 400 to 724 lightyears away. It will go supernova eventually but is out of our danger zone when it does. We’ll just get a fantastic light show anytime between now and one-hundred thousand years fin the future.

Enjoy the video from Cool Worlds, its where I got the idea for this post.

 "The First Civilization to Emerge in the Galaxy" 

Dead Bear Cubs from the Twilight Zone

 

You got to hand it to the great Rod Serling, the creator of television’s Twilight Zone. Even though the series is decades old many of the episodes are just a relevant and timely over two decades into the twenty-first century. To show this fact, my twenty-eight year old son loves The Twilight Zone and we will have discussions over various episodes. He has actual training in college-level philosophical reasoning and I’m usually floored by the points he brings up.

Back when I was his age, and younger, whenever my fellow nerds and I talked about one of the episodes our discussions were quite superficial. We pondered what we would do if placed into a situation where the natural world and metaphysical events intersected.

These conversation tended to die out whenever one of my nerd brethren lamented that our existence was devoid of such occurrences. That barring the near infinitesimally small chance that such situations might occur, our universe plays strictly by the known laws of nature.

No, I’m not one who believes in things like interdimensional “shadow people”, haphazard crossings over to parallel universes or into the past. Now the science fiction episode where a dude is imprisoned alone on an asteroid, but gets a robot woman for company and falls in love with her is a whole other matter. Real life advances in AI and life-like robotic technology is bringing such tale closer to reality.

However I was dumbstruck the other day by a thought that was ridiculous but unsettling. That maybe Twilight Zone events occur in our universe, they just take a different form from that on television.

May I present to you the strange occurrence where a presidential candidate from a prominent American family tells the story of how he and several companions found a dead bear cub on the side of the road. This individual then gets the idea that since the bear cub is unspoiled he plans on skinning the dead animal and eating the meat.

But wait, this member of a family called “American Royalty” by many realizes that his busy schedule will not allow him to skin the animal before it spoils. His Twilight Zone-ish behavior continues with him secretly abandoning the dead animal in New York’s Central Park. Just to add icing to this surreal story this son of a beloved political leader who was assassinated, places a damaged bicycle that he also had in his possession next the unfortunate cub to suggest that someone hit and killed the animal, then ran away.

The bear cub is found and is reported on national news. But the subject of this bizarre story only comes forward many years later when a major publication is about to expose him.

There’s already a shitload of Twilight Zone material here but it becomes even worse when take into account this individual has people convinced he should be president of the United States.

No, I didn’t see fit to throw the Orange Buffoon into this equation. He’s a long reoccurring national nightmare and I can only deal with a finite amount of crazy in this day and age.

Rod Serling was a talented writer and producer but not even he would have delved into this level of insanity.

Late Stage Capitalism

 It was my son that introduced me to the concept of “Late Stage Capitalism.” The more accurate description, but worded in a way I can understand, of the idea is that capitalism has entered the phase where its practices and use of resources are unsustainable and where labor is exploited all for an increasingly smaller profit margin. 

Among the list of problems LSC manifests is the commodification of all aspects of life. One of them being a major corporation charging a ridiculous amount for a simple cup of water.

I have no idea at the validity of the meme at the top of this post. But given my years of involvement with the deceptively playful but ultimately amoral corporate mouse, I believe it could very well be true. 

If this is true I don’t blame the employee– who the Mouse euphemistically calls “cast member” for wanting to charge a kid almost over four dollars for a cup of water. Even before the pandemic, any lower end employee of the Mouse knew they were just minor cogs in the corporate machinery. 

One of the many problems with LSC is how very few of the upper echelon understand its keypoint. It is ultimately unsustainable and will either change or collapse.