A STORY OF FREEDOM
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DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
A STORY OF FREEDOM
by Adam Carroll Draper
I am working on a story. It’s a strange story about humans that live on another planet. It’s completely fictional, so I can make it be whatever I want. I’m still just playing around with it, but it starts in a broad view of a country called Freedom on a strange, strange planet they call Orbis.
Orbis had a long history of wars. The people of Orbis talked a lot about peace, but they got wars instead. In fact, there was rarely (if ever) a time on this planet where there was not some kind of war going on somewhere.
Freedom was a rich country, the richest country that had ever existed on Orbis. The people of Freedom worked; I mean they worked all the time – more than any other country on Orbis. Just like everybody else on Orbis, the people of Freedom talked a lot about peace, but they were also often at war. The story is set at a time when Freedom is at war. In fact, at that point, Freedom was always at war because Freedom was always under attack. They named their country Freedom because, in addition to peace, the people there talked a lot about freedom, and they considered themselves free. They meant well for the most part, but their way of being free was hardly free in any objective sense. Freedom had more laws and rules than any other country on Orbis. In fact, Freedom had more rules governing the conduct of its people than all the other countries of Orbis combined for the entire history of the planet. It had more people in prison as a percentage of the population than any other country, too. Odd place, Freedom.
The people of Freedom cared more about being rich than they cared about peace or freedom. They conflated the ideas of peace and freedom with wealth, so that all three became synonymous, an amalgam, if you will. That was the real problem with Freedom. Its people were so wrapped up in making a living that they accepted lies as truth if the lies continued to keep the system going that provided their wealth. As you might expect, the people of Freedom talked a lot about truth, too. For the most part, the people of Freedom valued truth, but deep down they accepted that truth did not put food on their tables. Money was a more desperate fact than the truth.
This last part about money was the crux of Freedom’s existential dilemma. Make no mistake, this whole story centers around the fact that, no matter what was said or believed, Freedom was in an existential dilemma. The people of Freedom knew it, but they seemed powerless to do anything about it. Freedom’s money was as abstract in concept as peace, freedom or truth. This was the heart of the crux of the enigma that few either knew or would tolerate hearing about.
Bear in mind that this is my story, so I get to set the narrative as I choose. If you don’t like it, don’t read it – or write your own, more plausible fiction.
The present time of Freedom in this story had been preceded by several generations of amazing wealth. While the people of Freedom were generally more prosperous than people in a lot of other countries, the average person in Freedom was not rich at all. Some people in Freedom were very, very rich. Most people desperately wanted to be rich, and the entire society was built around the belief that anyone could be rich. Generations before, some of those who had been staggeringly wealthy, beyond wealth most anyone ever had in the history of Orbis, came up with an idea sort of like the one the Grinch had – “a wonderfully awful idea.” They developed ingenious ways to focus their money to encourage the behavior of those who wanted to be rich to the extent that it blinded the manipulated into accepting that manipulation as part of Freedom itself. That is what caused Freedom’s current existential dilemma.
Fast forward several generations. In the time the story is set, the people of Freedom lived in a kind of twilight zone. Their education, information, news, health, banking, food, transportation and even their entertainment was nearly completely dominated by around eight different corporations. The people of Freedom thought themselves the most informed people in the history of Orbis, but the information they got on almost any subject came from or through one or more of those eight corporations. The corporations were the progeny of those wealthy benefactors who had implemented the wonderfully awful idea generations earlier. I’ll just call them collectively, the Grinch. The people of freedom knew what the Grinch allowed them to know, and what they were allowed to know was subject to a carefully controlled narrative tailored by the Grinch, who controlled the eight corporations.
END PART I
Next week, I will finish setting up the story line of this sad planetary tale. Of course, this is completely fictional and should in no way be deemed analogous to the wonderful world in which we live, which is exactly the way we have been taught to think of it.
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, comment and/or share it. It helps. I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to red it.