Here's another one that @seraphima reminded me I hadn't brought over here. It is in progress but if you want it, here it is ...
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Teaghan and Sloan
I hate everyone.
Ok, no I don't, not really. I'm just angry.
Although, if I'm being honest with myself it's close to real hate for a few people around here. Including the person in the mirror that has a good bit of responsibility for me being in the situation I'm in.
I sold myself. That's worth hating yourself for isn't it?
At first I told myself that I didn't have any choice. I was alone. I had a roof over my head but that was being taken away. Mr. Burdock and his supporters said it was necessary to keep the peace. "Look where trying to run things like they used to be done led us," he said afterwards. "We've got to go to our roots to find a way out of this mess." The thing is by "roots" it took me a long time to understand that he meant returning to the Dark Ages, only without the Chivalry. And to be honest in the beginning things weren't all that bad. Now ... now I just don't know. But this isn't going to make sense to just blather on with bits and pieces of it. They want a confession then I'll give them a confession.
Where to start? Where to start? Well I'm not going all the way back to the beginning; there's absolutely no sense in it. That's been picked apart ad nauseum for so long that I'm not sure what is true and what isn't. I do know it started before I was old enough to realize anything was going on. I wasn't a baby or even a little kid by the time I figured out the world was pretty messed up, but I wasn't much more than that. Dad used to say that things fell apart so slowly you almost didn't notice it as you were too busy just trying to get through the day and the next problem.
The haves. The have nots. Some people had money, some people didn't. Some people had their own homes, some people didn't. Some people had food, some people didn't. Some people had jobs, some people didn't. Some people lived in peaceful communities, some people didn't.
We were the kind that lived in a peaceful community. For a while.
But nothing lasts forever right? You gotta go with the flow. Take things as they come. Deal with reality.
Blah, blah, blah. Yada, yada, yada.
I'd grown up living with the war and the prejudices on both sides which caused the war. It made things hard for a lot of reasons but hard was "normal" for me; my peers and I didn't know anything different. The hate and the rhetoric was even part of the school day. As it turns out if it hadn't been for the war I likely wouldn't have been born ... I was a whoopsie from when Dad was home on leave one time.
After my dad got too old and injured to be in the war he came home and used his pension to buy out my uncles and take over my grandparents' farm rather than see it go out of the family which is where it was heading fast. No sooner had he done that than my brothers were called up to go off to war. But lucky for them they didn't have to be in it long because finally, despite taking forever and a flaming day, everyone around the world finally got tired of fighting and agreed to a more or less permanent cease fire ... no one actually surrendered, everyone saved face, and wound up just deciding to stop shooting and bombing the crap out of each other because no one was winning. When no one is winning even war can get boring as sin after a while.
Suddenly there were a lot of extra men floating around with no jobs and nothing to really help them use up all of the testosterone they were used to burning off on the battlefield or in training for battle. You can't blame them exactly since they didn't get much help re-interfacing with society, though they've gotta hold some responsibility. I don't know. I know my brothers acted a little crazy sometimes but not too bad all things considered. Besides which Dad told them if they were going to keep living at home they had to contribute which meant working their butts off like the rest of us to put food on the table and keep the lights on. Then there was this bad virus that went around and it killed a lot of people. It wasn't as bad as the influenza pandemic after the First World War but it wasn't far off from it either. Its major claim to fame was that it killed a disproportionate number of older folks, little kids, … and women.
My grandparents and most of their generation died or became so debilitated that Heaven's Gates got a whole lot closer. A lot of babies and toddlers died too. What really got hit and threw the population out of kilter was the death of so many women. It seems that for some reason certain strains of the pandemic virus got help spreading around inside the human body by some kind of estrogen sensitivity mechanism or whatever. No one has ever really determined what exactly the estrogen had to do with it, the scientists just knew that it did. They say that it is likely every female on the planet got infected but not all of them got sick. They don't know why for that either. But the fact remains that my mom and big sister Hannah died and I didn't. My dad and brothers - Jeremiah and Jason - were totally devastated and freaked and if it wasn't for the fact that I needed to help on the farm to keep things running they probably wouldn't have even let me outside of the house.
So from that point forward there were a lot of unattached males with grief issues and not as much self-control as you would like them to have. Now the haves and have nots were defined in a different way. Some men had families, some did not. Some men had female companionship, some did not. Women and girls started getting treated almost like a commodity in some places. That may have been like it already was in other countries but that's not the way it was supposed to be here; yet it was. People still tried to act civilized but if they would have gotten scratched you'd find it was only on the surface.
All of this out of kiltered-ness caused a schism in our community; a bad one. Everyone you might have asked would have given you a different reason for the schism, most of them trying to keep it something traditional like financial and social issues, but I heard my dad and brothers talking and it was really just over that some guys wanted or needed a woman anyway they could get her and on the other side there were men who were just as determined to keep and protect the women under their care.
Into this horrible mix came people that were supposed to be there to help straighten out the problems we were having. They would arrest agitators and protect women who just wanted to be able to walk down the street unmolested. They created public work projects to put people to work and give them something constructive to do. But behind the scenes they started pitting one person against another, one family against another. Feuds started up. The helpers were actually agitators themselves setting our community up to be taken over by their organization.
Then WHAM it was open war ... practically across the country all at the same time. And then open war around our country became real war around the world as the cease fire failed because we weren't the only ones to suffer devastating losses from the pandemic. It seems countries thought that the easiest way to downsize their young, male population was to use them as cannon fodder. A temporary fix, if that, because the war came to a halt as abruptly as it had started back up when several countries decided they were tired of there being no clear winners and used the nuclear option. Everyone quietly crawled back to their corners to lick their wounds.
Unfortunately not even that stopped all of the problems. Rainbows, skittles, and unicorn farts didn't suddenly fall from the sky making us all happy-happy; and, if there was a moral to the story it was blurred and blotched and no one could read it. Dad managed to keep Jeremiah and Jason, my hard-headed brothers, out of most of the trouble. We did what we could to stay to ourselves but we couldn't totally because our farm provided a lot of locally consumed produce and even some meat. It was like the Hatfields and McCoys where one side would take pot shots at the other side because of some imagined wrong or whatever. Dad and my brothers made sure I could take care of myself when they were away because it took all three of them to get the goods to town safely.
Only one day they didn't come back. There had been some kind of round up by whoever was in power that day and all three of them were executed in the center of town for having too much. Then someone remembered me and they started heading out to the farm. I didn't have to defend myself more than a few minutes using the guns Dad always had at the ready because Mr. Burdock and his men showed up and "arrested" the attackers. I was crying and asking for Dad and my brothers. He was pretty blunt about what had happened.
I didn't get hysterical ... in fact I stopped crying altogether. For some reason a part of me had already known because of a few things the attacking group of men had yelled. I just walked away from Mr. Burdock and went to the kitchen and came back with an igloo cooler of water for Mr. Burdock and his men. I may have been calm on the outside, trying to do the things I knew that Dad and Mom would have expected of me but on the inside ... I was dying. See I knew what was going to happen next.
Redistribution.
Mr. Burdock is a big wig in town. He heads what passes for the board of county commissioners. Dad had liked and respected him as far as anyone can like and respect a politician I suppose. But Mr. Burdock isn't just a politician ... he has a lot of practical experience from being a soldier, a city planner, and I don't know what all; at times it seems he's done a little bit of everything in his life. He is also a physically strong man and stills works with his own hands a lot. He leads from the front rather than from behind. He's a man other men will follow. He's a man's man. I just suppose I never thought what that would mean to me.
Redistribution.
One of the resulting problems that occurred because of the population destruction that occurred during the pandemic is that a lot of assets and resources are going to waste right at a time when the last thing we need is more waste. The old folks’ home in town is full of people that can no longer take care of themselves but have no family to help them out. We've got men who are single fathers that just can't work full time and take care of their kids full time. We've got a lot of kids that were the children of single mothers who have died so the orphanages and foster homes are packed ... mostly with boys. It is just a real mess all around.
In the case of the farm, for the community to lose what it produced was an unacceptable loss. No one even gave half a thought to the possibility that I could have kept things moving along if I'd had some help. Instead the state of mind that Mr. Burdock fostered was that women, being the weaker sex, could not do things like that; and not just because they were physically weaker but because they were too vulnerable to the less scrupulous. Apparently in Mr. Burdock's world women are distractions. He didn't blame us for it but it was a state of being that he felt needed remedying. So when it was discovered that there was no male heir to inherit the farm and work it with me/for me the BOCC used imminent domain to manage the problem.
But ...
Isn't there always a but? See the thing that was happening at the same time was that the "weaker sex" thing was really gaining ground. And then it happened. I became part of the redistribution to manage the distraction I would inevitably cause some poor males.
I've given this a lot of thought. Some of it is an excuse for why I made the choice I did and some of it is just a desire to find out why ... why things have taken the turn they have. I want to rationalize and justify why everyone has done what they've done to make it comfortable and palatable. I guess most of the time it works, because I'm only half crazy and not completely crazy.
See I think what happened was that day someone determined that enough was enough. An example had to be made. My father and brothers weren't the only people executed that day in the town square. There were a lot of families hurting. A lot of people not thinking clearly. Maybe some of it was revenge too but mostly it was that everyone knew it just couldn't be allowed to happen anymore. The men that had executed my family and so many others were themselves executed. But that left a mess of broken up families and potentially ruining assets and somehow in a way it became the women's fault. And if not their fault they certainly hadn't helped matters as the women, or lack of, was said to be the root cause of everything. We were after all the weaker, distracting sex; no man would have done what they did if they'd been thinking straight. So since blame had to be laid, they laid it at the feet of women. I've talked to the few women that were there that day and they've all said that there was no reasoning with the men once the idea had been planted and their strategy developed.
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Teaghan and Sloan
Prologue
I hate everyone.
Ok, no I don't, not really. I'm just angry.
Although, if I'm being honest with myself it's close to real hate for a few people around here. Including the person in the mirror that has a good bit of responsibility for me being in the situation I'm in.
I sold myself. That's worth hating yourself for isn't it?
At first I told myself that I didn't have any choice. I was alone. I had a roof over my head but that was being taken away. Mr. Burdock and his supporters said it was necessary to keep the peace. "Look where trying to run things like they used to be done led us," he said afterwards. "We've got to go to our roots to find a way out of this mess." The thing is by "roots" it took me a long time to understand that he meant returning to the Dark Ages, only without the Chivalry. And to be honest in the beginning things weren't all that bad. Now ... now I just don't know. But this isn't going to make sense to just blather on with bits and pieces of it. They want a confession then I'll give them a confession.
Where to start? Where to start? Well I'm not going all the way back to the beginning; there's absolutely no sense in it. That's been picked apart ad nauseum for so long that I'm not sure what is true and what isn't. I do know it started before I was old enough to realize anything was going on. I wasn't a baby or even a little kid by the time I figured out the world was pretty messed up, but I wasn't much more than that. Dad used to say that things fell apart so slowly you almost didn't notice it as you were too busy just trying to get through the day and the next problem.
The haves. The have nots. Some people had money, some people didn't. Some people had their own homes, some people didn't. Some people had food, some people didn't. Some people had jobs, some people didn't. Some people lived in peaceful communities, some people didn't.
We were the kind that lived in a peaceful community. For a while.
But nothing lasts forever right? You gotta go with the flow. Take things as they come. Deal with reality.
Blah, blah, blah. Yada, yada, yada.
I'd grown up living with the war and the prejudices on both sides which caused the war. It made things hard for a lot of reasons but hard was "normal" for me; my peers and I didn't know anything different. The hate and the rhetoric was even part of the school day. As it turns out if it hadn't been for the war I likely wouldn't have been born ... I was a whoopsie from when Dad was home on leave one time.
After my dad got too old and injured to be in the war he came home and used his pension to buy out my uncles and take over my grandparents' farm rather than see it go out of the family which is where it was heading fast. No sooner had he done that than my brothers were called up to go off to war. But lucky for them they didn't have to be in it long because finally, despite taking forever and a flaming day, everyone around the world finally got tired of fighting and agreed to a more or less permanent cease fire ... no one actually surrendered, everyone saved face, and wound up just deciding to stop shooting and bombing the crap out of each other because no one was winning. When no one is winning even war can get boring as sin after a while.
Suddenly there were a lot of extra men floating around with no jobs and nothing to really help them use up all of the testosterone they were used to burning off on the battlefield or in training for battle. You can't blame them exactly since they didn't get much help re-interfacing with society, though they've gotta hold some responsibility. I don't know. I know my brothers acted a little crazy sometimes but not too bad all things considered. Besides which Dad told them if they were going to keep living at home they had to contribute which meant working their butts off like the rest of us to put food on the table and keep the lights on. Then there was this bad virus that went around and it killed a lot of people. It wasn't as bad as the influenza pandemic after the First World War but it wasn't far off from it either. Its major claim to fame was that it killed a disproportionate number of older folks, little kids, … and women.
My grandparents and most of their generation died or became so debilitated that Heaven's Gates got a whole lot closer. A lot of babies and toddlers died too. What really got hit and threw the population out of kilter was the death of so many women. It seems that for some reason certain strains of the pandemic virus got help spreading around inside the human body by some kind of estrogen sensitivity mechanism or whatever. No one has ever really determined what exactly the estrogen had to do with it, the scientists just knew that it did. They say that it is likely every female on the planet got infected but not all of them got sick. They don't know why for that either. But the fact remains that my mom and big sister Hannah died and I didn't. My dad and brothers - Jeremiah and Jason - were totally devastated and freaked and if it wasn't for the fact that I needed to help on the farm to keep things running they probably wouldn't have even let me outside of the house.
So from that point forward there were a lot of unattached males with grief issues and not as much self-control as you would like them to have. Now the haves and have nots were defined in a different way. Some men had families, some did not. Some men had female companionship, some did not. Women and girls started getting treated almost like a commodity in some places. That may have been like it already was in other countries but that's not the way it was supposed to be here; yet it was. People still tried to act civilized but if they would have gotten scratched you'd find it was only on the surface.
All of this out of kiltered-ness caused a schism in our community; a bad one. Everyone you might have asked would have given you a different reason for the schism, most of them trying to keep it something traditional like financial and social issues, but I heard my dad and brothers talking and it was really just over that some guys wanted or needed a woman anyway they could get her and on the other side there were men who were just as determined to keep and protect the women under their care.
Into this horrible mix came people that were supposed to be there to help straighten out the problems we were having. They would arrest agitators and protect women who just wanted to be able to walk down the street unmolested. They created public work projects to put people to work and give them something constructive to do. But behind the scenes they started pitting one person against another, one family against another. Feuds started up. The helpers were actually agitators themselves setting our community up to be taken over by their organization.
Then WHAM it was open war ... practically across the country all at the same time. And then open war around our country became real war around the world as the cease fire failed because we weren't the only ones to suffer devastating losses from the pandemic. It seems countries thought that the easiest way to downsize their young, male population was to use them as cannon fodder. A temporary fix, if that, because the war came to a halt as abruptly as it had started back up when several countries decided they were tired of there being no clear winners and used the nuclear option. Everyone quietly crawled back to their corners to lick their wounds.
Unfortunately not even that stopped all of the problems. Rainbows, skittles, and unicorn farts didn't suddenly fall from the sky making us all happy-happy; and, if there was a moral to the story it was blurred and blotched and no one could read it. Dad managed to keep Jeremiah and Jason, my hard-headed brothers, out of most of the trouble. We did what we could to stay to ourselves but we couldn't totally because our farm provided a lot of locally consumed produce and even some meat. It was like the Hatfields and McCoys where one side would take pot shots at the other side because of some imagined wrong or whatever. Dad and my brothers made sure I could take care of myself when they were away because it took all three of them to get the goods to town safely.
Only one day they didn't come back. There had been some kind of round up by whoever was in power that day and all three of them were executed in the center of town for having too much. Then someone remembered me and they started heading out to the farm. I didn't have to defend myself more than a few minutes using the guns Dad always had at the ready because Mr. Burdock and his men showed up and "arrested" the attackers. I was crying and asking for Dad and my brothers. He was pretty blunt about what had happened.
I didn't get hysterical ... in fact I stopped crying altogether. For some reason a part of me had already known because of a few things the attacking group of men had yelled. I just walked away from Mr. Burdock and went to the kitchen and came back with an igloo cooler of water for Mr. Burdock and his men. I may have been calm on the outside, trying to do the things I knew that Dad and Mom would have expected of me but on the inside ... I was dying. See I knew what was going to happen next.
Redistribution.
Mr. Burdock is a big wig in town. He heads what passes for the board of county commissioners. Dad had liked and respected him as far as anyone can like and respect a politician I suppose. But Mr. Burdock isn't just a politician ... he has a lot of practical experience from being a soldier, a city planner, and I don't know what all; at times it seems he's done a little bit of everything in his life. He is also a physically strong man and stills works with his own hands a lot. He leads from the front rather than from behind. He's a man other men will follow. He's a man's man. I just suppose I never thought what that would mean to me.
Redistribution.
One of the resulting problems that occurred because of the population destruction that occurred during the pandemic is that a lot of assets and resources are going to waste right at a time when the last thing we need is more waste. The old folks’ home in town is full of people that can no longer take care of themselves but have no family to help them out. We've got men who are single fathers that just can't work full time and take care of their kids full time. We've got a lot of kids that were the children of single mothers who have died so the orphanages and foster homes are packed ... mostly with boys. It is just a real mess all around.
In the case of the farm, for the community to lose what it produced was an unacceptable loss. No one even gave half a thought to the possibility that I could have kept things moving along if I'd had some help. Instead the state of mind that Mr. Burdock fostered was that women, being the weaker sex, could not do things like that; and not just because they were physically weaker but because they were too vulnerable to the less scrupulous. Apparently in Mr. Burdock's world women are distractions. He didn't blame us for it but it was a state of being that he felt needed remedying. So when it was discovered that there was no male heir to inherit the farm and work it with me/for me the BOCC used imminent domain to manage the problem.
But ...
Isn't there always a but? See the thing that was happening at the same time was that the "weaker sex" thing was really gaining ground. And then it happened. I became part of the redistribution to manage the distraction I would inevitably cause some poor males.
I've given this a lot of thought. Some of it is an excuse for why I made the choice I did and some of it is just a desire to find out why ... why things have taken the turn they have. I want to rationalize and justify why everyone has done what they've done to make it comfortable and palatable. I guess most of the time it works, because I'm only half crazy and not completely crazy.
See I think what happened was that day someone determined that enough was enough. An example had to be made. My father and brothers weren't the only people executed that day in the town square. There were a lot of families hurting. A lot of people not thinking clearly. Maybe some of it was revenge too but mostly it was that everyone knew it just couldn't be allowed to happen anymore. The men that had executed my family and so many others were themselves executed. But that left a mess of broken up families and potentially ruining assets and somehow in a way it became the women's fault. And if not their fault they certainly hadn't helped matters as the women, or lack of, was said to be the root cause of everything. We were after all the weaker, distracting sex; no man would have done what they did if they'd been thinking straight. So since blame had to be laid, they laid it at the feet of women. I've talked to the few women that were there that day and they've all said that there was no reasoning with the men once the idea had been planted and their strategy developed.