Zersetzung
Dying people, dead people, left in rooms empty of colour. Blue garbs, coloured lines, heartless laughter, empty smiles, chatter of distraction. Understaffed, overworked and underpaid. Bodies with bony hands wrapped in skin so thin that it would tear like wrapping paper. Friend and family alike unwilling to come, to face what they must once. Crowding away in willing ignorance. Gerontocracies until the successors, older than they were when they took the stage move forward, with less children, less care, bearing thought only to one’s own future. The line must go up.
Weak fathers with woeful sons, unable to face the inevitable, clutching on to every cent out of hedonism or spite, as though it will save them from a death or a life unlived or that it will come with them into the next like some kind of Pharaoh. Sons unwilling to become men, unwilling to become fathers, unwilling to even become able to look after anyone other than themselves, and they can’t even do that. They’d rather lock themselves in their room than begin to climb and take responsibility.
Mothers jealous of their better daughters, encouraging them to destroy themselves out of spite. Daughters unwilling to become women, stuck in childhood perpetually. To them, anything cute and small is a surrogate child, just like playing with dolls. The gratuity of attention substituting for attraction is enough in what they’ve been convinced is a post-scarcity world.
Power comes from the wall. Food from the supermarket. You’re assured the laptop you own didn’t kill a third worlder at 20 from inhaling silicon dust or heavy metal poisoning, but you just couldn’t beat that price, and you sometimes give a dollar to charity and believe The Right Things ™ so you’ve basically balanced out your morality to be a good person. Wash the blood off your hands with a soap made from a dozen chemicals that were tested on caged animals and will still give you cancer.
Systems propped up by meddling and conspiracy to not only favour those currently in power, but enforcing dependence and participation in the system. After a certain point incompetence and self-interest becomes indistinguishable from malicious sabotage. You can never be independent, never alone. Keep your phone on you at all times, use your ID for everything, cameras every fifty meters on the highway ‘just in case’. A rats nest of rules and laws pretending to be in the interest of helping and managing the bottom quintile, but actually with the effect of stifling everyone except those with enough authority or capital to avoid the consequences. Choking the middle classes of every innovation, every opportunity, every idea, dollar, because that crushes hope, and people without hope eventually break down enough to step in line, and the line currently doesn’t involve any kind of independence, or even interdependence, or owning land, or having a house, or having a family, or children, or doing anything without someone with a checklist working for the underling of an intern of a manager of a branch of government that you didn’t even know existed (apparently it has fifteen thousand employees) coming by to remind you that you will never be free even if you are doing nothing wrong, coming by to make sure you’re not getting too independent. In hierarchies this large even fellow countrymen are foreigners.
We despair at the piteous treatment of the elderly, locked away in private rooms, paying too much for food and basic care. But we are more than happy to do the same to the young. A dozen adults in a doghouse that’s been downgraded into a shoebox because a blind eye has been turned to both the maintenance and humanity. Working for an equally bad house they’ll never own, a visa they’ll no longer get to others’ abuses, a husband or wife they’ll never meet because they’re working too much and exhausted even in their free time. But don’t worry, much like the elderly, we have events for entertainment and building connections where we can be coddled and filed in after one another to wave baby rattles at one another in the hope that we find some fleeting connection before moving onto the next person. I believe they call it speed dating. Because clearly what we need after all of this is more options, more quickly. Every desire must be satiated, all gratification instant, all morality ambiguous. Churn and spin, little cog, until your metal is worn through and nothing is left but an empty ring who no longer has will to protest being spat into retirement home with all the others.
Withering away alone, surrounded strangers both paid and those like you every day, changing your sheets, washing you down, doing tests for the same things as though whether if you had super-cancer it would change anything. Wondering if your children will remember, or your grandchildren if you were somehow lucky enough to raise children good enough to have any, if anything you ever did amounted to so much as a fraction of a net positive in the world.
Hey, but at least you were happy.
Right?