... We desperately needed the water to survive, but we feared what it brought in our midst, in our minds, and to our social networks ...
I can recall now, although the dream is finally fading after awakening from it 1 1/2 hours ago at 5:10 am, that we were constantly on the move from one ruin to another, sleeping under ruined buildings when we could, making small fires if we were able to find dry things to burn. But we were always on the lookout, always on high alert taking care not to be attacked by other clans, other individuals, other... creatures.
The current biggest problem was that the region we were in had been governed by a vicious military junta for a very long time and the military, and paramilitary forces had carte blanche to do whatever they pleased and nobody on the "outside" could say or do anything to stop them from the horrors they forced their people to endure (this must have come from reading news on current events in Myanmar).
Food aid would be welcomed, then confiscated and never delivered to those people suffering, even though the military and governing warlords always claimed that the food was distributed to those who "needed it most". No outside observers were allowed, no foreign aid workers allowed to follow their deliveries; everything had to be handed over to the powers that ruled the land. Just like what China is doing in Tibet, all news channels, and communications networks were controlled entirely by the military rulers so that no real information could leak out, or make its way back into the zones. Nobody anywhere knew what life outside their microcosm was really like.
People had become restless, they were forming pockets of ever-increasing resistance, fighting back in a "Robin Hood-esque" style of guerrilla warfare (much like what goes on in Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan , Palestine and other warring states). Of course they were considered to be "terrorists" in their attempts to destabilize the ruling party's efforts at reconstruction, as well as those who supported the military junta's existence (for the time being). But just like most every rebellion, or insurrection in the past history of our world, they were all based on a common desire to rise above the oppression, the ethnic cleansings, the numerous whatever'cides that the governments exposed their own peoples to. Without these "freedom fighters", fighting for the rights of the average man, woman and child in the street, many poor would have been worse off, many would have died in their squalor, poverty, and starvation.
This of course lead to the military forces destroying entire towns and villages that were believed to harbour these terrorist organizations (as Israel does in Palestine), bulldozing down complete family dwellings, apartments, holy places of worship. And of course this just further enraged the innocent, lighting a further fire within to continue to resist in hopes that one day they would be able to lift themselves above the horrors they had to face.
Everything was scarce: food, fuel, especially water, and we had "devolved" from our "abundance mentality" to "scarcity economics" which caused people to polarize, and resent those who had so much more than those who suffered with so much less. Of course this led to uprisings against the "rich" who where often just those who worked hard and had a good idea that they were able to profit from. These localized uprisings against the "aristocracy" were known as FrenchRevolvers, after the famous French Revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment