Jamuh shouted at his neighbors as they each stood staring at him from behind glass.Someone had already reported him twice!
The 4th Covid lockdown had turned almost all usually rational, friendly, people into danger averse cowards. Jamuh was having none of this nonsense. All he could do was challenge the gathering mentality of “sheep” and disrupt their mass insanity.
“I suppose me walking alone outdoors upsets your silly sense of safety! Do you see a murder being committed or a victim you hope will die?!”
Jamuh had been suddenly cut off from traveling, dining out, and going to work only because his instincts had told him that the “shot” was going to be ineffective and possibly dangerous. Hadn’t anyone learned from the past?
“YOU KNOW WHAT’S DANGEROUS?! FOOLS WHO THINK THEY CAN TELL OTHERS WHAT TO DO!”
As he stomped round the corner, his flesh crawled. He thought no one could craft a better tactic for implementing government totalitarianism than this virus even if he worked directly for the CCP.
He’d never told anyone else what to do yet he was supposed to be some kind of criminal?
“One day they’ll find out how they’ve been used as enforcers for the state…as guinea pigs… and as agents of their own destruction.”
As he made the circle toward home, Jamuh had calmed. He knew no one would hunt him down and apologize for all of this. He’d never ask them to either, as long as they all learned to mind their own business.
Helen began her evenings, since she started her first week as a kindergarten teacher, with a glass of wine. Her degree hadn’t prepared her for constant chatter and the “Why? question” hundreds of times a day!
By the next Monday, she worried why Lydia (the one student who sat quietly observing) hadn’t join the chaos. Helen became concerned about identifying a ‘learning disability’ frequently described by professors, so she decided to investigate.
Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces. The month of January is named for Janus.
Source: Wikipedia
We counted backwards at midnight on 31st December 2022.
How should we go forward now? I need to know how many months, weeks, days I have to make my life or this world a better place to survive. I may not die at the end of this year, nor will the world end. But it will be criminal to lose time.
Or do you prefer going with the flow, and letting life unfold on its own?
I would love to see your take on this.
A Story of Arrogance Sponsored by Greed
Shelly was excited to get busy! Her major in Earth Sciences had prepared her for a career in meteorology but her university experience had given her an unrequested minor in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She was determined to make a BIG impact and “save the world”!
Immediately Shelly was inducted into a graduate program with a mission to ‘solve’ Climate Change. It was well funded by the U.S. government so Shelly knew her scientific energy wouldn’t have any barriers. She began at once.
The weather was after all primarily influenced by the winds, so she decided to chart all incidences of the doldrums-which was a name for the stagnating occurrence of a ‘pause’ in the flow of ocean winds. She felt that increases in that ‘pausing’ of wind currents was a crucial clue that could lead her to making an impactful discovery thus solving the Climate Change Crisis and saving the whole world.
Having spent the first morning in an induction mandatory “equity” training, she couldn’t wait to jump into her research! But like an electric shock, her training’s ‘philosophy’ abruptly bumped up against her ‘scientific expertise’ and she almost lost her balance as she sank into a chair.
On one hand, she was supposed to make mankind ‘healthier’ by diligently working to produce equal human outcomes, but her wind flow studies clearly indicated that unequal forces were the basis for the wind which maintained nearly all of the Earth’s health.
Shelly felt numb but continued to examine that paradox. Was the DEI movement a cloaked, contradictory, cause with hidden motives? Why hadn’t she noticed that?!
Shelly paced while talking to herself. “Diversity and equity can’t even occupy the same space much less the same cause! Either the mission is to embrace ‘differences’, or it’s seeking to produce ‘sameness’, it can’t possibly do both. Sameness is a ‘death sentence’ in Nature. I’m not sure human ‘sameness’ would automatically be good for the World.”
When she brought her confusion to the also well-funded DEI unit assigned to her program, she was told to never, ever, express her questions and concerns to anyone. The reason they bluntly PRIVATELY offered was, “We will most certainly lose our funding and YOU will lose your job!”
Shelly knew it would be “criminal to lose time in her pursuit of ‘saving the world’ ” but it now was crystal clear that that egotistical super-human activity shouldn’t have ever been her focus.
Feeling foolish and embarrassed, she handed in her job resignation the next day and decided to run for public office where she could have a better chance of saving her own community (perhaps her country) from being bamboozled into wasting valuable monetary resources on ‘pie in the sky’ goals. An arrogant human element was more immediately endangering everyone than Climate Change, and its name was GREED.
For this challenge, Christine asks us to write a story in just 6 minutes inspired by the photo below. If you’d like to join, follow the link at the bottom of this post.
Amanda was an only child and had moved out of her family home 9 years and 4 months ago leaving many of her personal items behind. At first, her excuse not to take them was because of her tiny efficiency off-campus apartment. Then, she graduated and moved across the country. And two years ago, she got married and had a child. Every time her mother expressed a desire to ‘clean up’ Amanda’s old room, she absolutely refused for anyone else to ‘rummage’ through “her memories”. Finally, her mom and dad decided to sell their family home and buy a motorhome for doing some long ‘wished for’ traveling. Her mom boxed up every little item including stuffed animals, dried up hair conditioner, and a deflated balloon from Amanda’s 17th birthday. When Amanda received the hastily packed box ‘postage due’ she had a hissy fit. Everything clearly had been dumped into it! Inside the box, she found this note:
Dear Amanda, Here are the “memories” that you’ve somehow forgotten. There was absolutely no rummaging involved in the packing of this box. Consider the price of ‘postage due‘ the accumulatedstorage fee that was accruingfor 9 years. No needto thank us for the family discount price.
I have chosen words or situations for this week’s prompt from Baba Vanga’s predictions for 2023.
Devastating solar storm
Explosion in a nuclear plant
Human birth in laboratories
Alien attacks
Earth changing its orbit
Bioweapons
You need not use the words verbatim. You can use one or more of the situations as a stimulus for imagination and base your piece on it.
Fear and the UNKNOWN: The Promotion of Fear and Ignorance through Censorship
Jesse folded his hands and sat back from the computer screen. The staff prediction’s list in front of him, of mostly apocalyptic events, made him chuckle. Most had already happened to some degree and the others were based on what his more alarmist fellow science fiction editors liked to call unverified ‘conspiracy theories’. He’d come to accept that blatant lack of self-awareness from co-workers, that was currently spreading faster than Covid-19, but rather than get upset by it, he chose to be amused.
Theories, after all, encompassed the whole genre with which they were dealing. Only recently had the modifier of “conspiracy” become a popular ‘wink’ for dismissing big ideas. The only conspiracy he could detect was this new, unimaginative, ‘group denying’ of thought according to ‘tastes’. But the covert- and alarming- call for censorship was not something registering on his ‘amusement meter’. He wanted people who worked for him to have a great deal of intellectual confidence in their ability to entertain all ideas.
Current recommendations to remove ‘misinformation’ from the public square by ‘experts’ (and political tyrants) who believe the public is subject to mass hysteria, made Jesse shudder. He’d even heard a few folks complain that other people’s ideas were harmful! Jesse understood how more information and ideas, not less or fewer, offer us the better chance to remain calm and reasonable when tested.
The dire prediction on the list of an Alien Attack in 2023 had tickled him the most, though. Jesse wondered how many of his young staffers were aware of the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. If so, he wondered if they’d confirmed their elitist inclinations a bit from the media propaganda of that time. He decided to call a meeting in order to give them more information.
As for the rest of the list of 2023 predictions, Jesse thought, “Who knows?”.
It’s your choice. Choose one or both to take you to a different world.
There is no restriction on format of the piece. There is no last date either, unless you wish to be featured in the Weekly Wrap.
Colorblind
It felt like a bolt of lightning!
Griffin sat straight up in bed with a shiver.
Had he always dreamt in color?
“What difference does that make you stupid fool. It was just a random dream.”
It was amazingly vivid. But spattered paintbrushes in a rainbow of colors are all I can recall of it. It must have been the result of that spicy midnight snack. Lesson learned.
It was only a few minutes before his alarm would go off, so Griffin Prime jumped out of bed and readied himself for work. His morning energy felt electric. He had a good feeling about a breakthrough happening today.
While the ‘gifted’ young man relaxed in the Think Tank lounge, the dream haunted him. His ability to immediately dismiss mumbo jumbo seemed unusually ‘lazy’. An unfamiliar angst started to interfere with his logical brilliant mind.
I know dreams are just electrical impulses in my brain, that there’s no such thing as God, and everything that cannot be easily explained through my own examination can be immediately filed in my ‘coincidence bin’. There’s no meaning in dreams, and colors are for kids, so get a grip and get to work, Griffin!
And work he did. By lunch Griffin had labeled a dozen of his colleagues’ theories RIDICULOUS, UTTERLY UNPROVEABLE, and GIVE ME A BREAK! Satisfied with himself beyond his usual hubris (a feat usually attainable only by fictional Gods), he called it a day and decided to walk home. Walking and observing the ‘common’ man offered him such comic relief.
He chuckled at garbagemen, rolled his eyes at young mothers with crying children, and mocked a group of homeless people arguing over a bottle of wine. As he passed the church on the corner, he noticed a line of mourners filing to their cars for a funeral procession. A man who seemed to be the “ringleader” of those ignorant folks, suddenly cut him off, looked into his eyes and whispered, “Appreciate the colors, brother. God be with you.” Griffin’s impulse to spit in his face was interrupted by a sudden excruciating electric shock in his head that knocked him to the ground.
He next awakened in a hospital bed with bandages around his skull and alarm bells going off. He watched nurses rush to him from a vantage point of floating above the bed. Around him bright beautiful colors began to obscure that scene and a soft reassuring voice whispered, “Appreciate the colors. I am with you.”
It would be weeks before he’d awaken again in that same hospital bed and to his amazement, he could actually ‘feel’ every color in the room! It was then that he realized colors had never held any meaning to him. He had dismissed them as he had everything that hadn’t come from his own logical perception.
The first thing Griffin would do upon leaving the hospital after a life-threatening brain aneurism, coma, and near-death experience, would be to dispose of his ‘coincidence bin’. So much more interested him now and he wanted, for the first time, to dream, and live, in full color. Evaluating things, he couldn’t explain, no longer would be dealt with in black and white.
Nope! We weren’t going on a boat again. The kids got seasick the last time and learned nothing more than how to vomit over the railing without falling in. We hadn’t saved enough money to fly anywhere so trapsing the Nature’s Wonders Club of 8-year-olds through our own local natural wonders seemed thebest decision. One of the parents offered to drive us to the base of the trail leading to our famous woodland peak which was the tallest in our state. I would carry a concealed handgun which I’d thoroughly oiled and loaded in private. It was likely I wouldn’t need to shoot it but having it was the wisest thing to do. Some of the parents may have objected but speaking to them about the value of guns in the wild was out of the question. Naive and ignorant of many topics concerning Nature and pro-active safety, discussing my decision would have complicated the matter and brought political resistance into play. Bears and ‘bad guys’ aren’t usually political, but they are, on occasion, more dangerous than those who are.
Now we are at a crime scene! Lights, rescue crews, and State Police surround my huddled, yet safe, group of 6. Professionals worked to preserve the drug evidence and are done with the questioning. We’d had a great time telling ghost stories and roasting marshmallows by the overnight fire, but on our way back in the morning, two men surprised us on the trail. They were most certainly drug smugglers who didn’t want any witnesses. My handgun saved us from certain death by wounding one and detaining the other. The kids had gotten more than a Nature training but a real-life lesson about not allowing strangers to get too close and that carrying a gun can be the right choice. Not one parent has complained about me carrying a gun since.
Mensen maken de samenleving en nemen daarin een positie in. Deze website geeft toegang tot een diversiteit aan artikelen die gaan over 'samenleven', belicht vanuit verschillende perspectieven. De artikelen hebben gemeen dat er gezocht wordt naar wat 'mensen bindt, in plaats van wat hen scheidt'.
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