Watermelon Watershed
Sylvia Shawcross
So I’m looking at the watermelon and thinking about the world we live in.
It’s one of those small happy watermelons all round and conveniently small. It is on sale. It is $8.99. This is a big savings because it is down from $14.99.
And I’m thinking how much I love watermelons in the hot days of the summer and how this is apparently now an ancient memory because the likelihood I’d buy a watermelon such as this for $14.99 is called not bloody likely. And the idea that I could grow my own with my property is also not bloody likely.
So unless someone invites me to lunch with a service of watermelon or they figure out how to 3D print the things in a lab, well… it was nice knowing you watermelon. But someone will buy the watermelons, the wealthy perhaps or the frantic millennial who has no time to check prices, sandwiched as they are between work and aging parents and young children; and who will just throw it all on the credit card to deal with later. One day.
They are the rushing and the rushed who run on empty most of the time but at least that saves on carbon emissions and for this a ragged smile might be warranted. They’re saving the earth when they cannot save themselves, some would say, but that might be too dark to consider really.
Maybe the watermelons will grow shrivelled and moldy and be fed to the pigs if there are any pig farms left or perhaps the insects in the insect farm or ploughed into landfill and the cycle of life will go on and the poor and the desperate will eventually stop buying watermelon-flavoured jelly beans because they don’t remember what a watermelon is and why risk their pittance on the taste of unknown things?
Better to buy Ramen noodles and strawberry jello they say with haunted wisdom. New wisdom plucked from the ether without history or culture now forming its own banal catchphrases under the New Normal.
We used to say “A penny saved is a penny earned.” What good is that to them now? They who do not even know the meaning of the word “save.’ Or even what a penny is for that matter. How could they understand the word “save”? Indebted before they even began.
But I digress…The important thing is, watermelon are not worth $8.99 and that is that.
The really really important thing however is that it is time to be honest. It has been easier to lie to ourselves that those in power are looking out for us.
The governments took our money and gave us watermelon for $14.99. They took our money and priced our homes beyond the reach of most. They took our money and sent it off to a foreign war to feed themselves and friends and murder other people’s children. Until perhaps they come to murder ours.
They took our money and left the homeless and broken hunched over on the streets. They took our money and failed to protect us from crime. They took our money and then our jobs and did not replace them. They took our money and stole our culture and erased our history.
They took our money and fed us poison. They took our money and condemned and demonized the spiritual traditions that kept and keep us strong. They took our money and borrowed even more. Indebted us to foreign shores. They took our money and weaponized our good will.
They took our money and began corralling and branding us like cattle. They took our money and maimed our children psychologically and even physically. They broke up families. They took our money and taught us hatred for the other—the non-conformists, the questioners. They took our money and sold us to the corporations as slaves.
They took our hope and replaced it with their dystopian plastic utopia of empty grey machines and uniformity driven by robots and AI as if a human would want this.
They are taking our freedom. They are taking our freedom. That bears repeating twice.
Mostly they took our money and turned their backs to any questions. And if the government is not going to listen to the people then why should the people listen to their government? And is that really what they want at the end of the day? A deliberate forcing of an uprising by the people that accelerates the problems they’ve carefully orchestrated? And the desperation that will have the people clamouring for their solution? And for those who do not clamour for it but are fatalistically resigned to paying a price they need not have paid… they too will clutter the gutters of a broken world. They are no different.
All being done in the name of Global Socialism.
At no time in history has Socialism been a good thing for any world. Why would it be different now? They start with the belief that they are levelling the field and end up persecuting, imprisoning or murdering those who would disagree. They would say that this Socialism was not done right. This time, they say, it will be different. They always say that. Yet it has always been that way and the outcome is always the same.
The dead of history don’t talk but they could tell a story that stretches well beyond our sense of outrage… those that lived through Socialist regimes. They are the ghosts that whisper in the night when daylight is too bright.
And they will do all this and the planet will still go on. They will not save anything. Perhaps themselves. The rest they will just break. And even if the world with humans should die tomorrow for whatever reason, was this the way to treat each other at the end of it all?
And now the question becomes just how far are they willing to go?
And how far are we willing to go to protect what makes us human?
“They don’t even know that they don’t know.”
I think it was Chomsky.
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