A very long time ago, about a million years ago, when my daddy was a little boy, the world was flat. One could see a great distance if nothing was in the way.

My daddy told me he climbed to the top of a tree one day to see over the forest at the edge of the farm. He said what he saw was quite strange. Everything was reversed. People were dragged by their shadows, books vocalized their stories; you didn’t have to read them, pets took the human they owned for strolls. and though it was a long distance away you knew what people were thinking because thought, not speech, was audible. Interestingly, my father, who could read lips, realized what was said, wasn’t what you heard.

Everyone seemed happy. My father assumed people liked: being led about by faceless dark beings, told the contents of books without the effort of interpretation, and being cared for, though at the expense of freedom, a condition hidden by leisurely opportunities to canvas the community, even though on a leash. He thought this euphoria was most likely due to the absence of presumption, no one doubted anything they were told.

I began to compare the world my father observed with mine. Somewhere between the times of these worlds an entity had re-shaped the flat world. No matter how tall the tree, one could no longer observe what my father observed. Such opportunity now was below a horizon that hid its content with a curvature that defined my world. To know what was beyond the forest one would have to travel or believe the accounts of those who professed to have traveled.

No longer were thoughts audible. Based on people’s actions it was clear, as my father observed, the spoken words and the now inaudible thoughts differed substantially. These same actions were so common a large percentage of the population dismissed the actions and accepted the words as undeniable facts.

Books, which historically memorialized world affairs, are now composed to conceal principle activities. Those denied events are frequently labeled as objectionable to certain factions of the populous, and those who question the denials are labeled as anti-social and misinformed.

I ponder these issues every time I hear someone say they wish we could return to ‘The Good Old Days,’ and wonder do they want to return to a tipsy-turvy world, or do they really want a world where people mean what they say, and say what they mean?

Finis

By Dresden Fear

From: United States

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