A Brief History of The Revolution

I remember the final days of the old nation. The people in the streets, with their signs scribbled on the interior of old packing boxes, screamed at each other across multiple lanes of roaring traffic about which direction to take, left or right. Others shuffled along, going about their lives as if nothing had changed, numb from the slow erosion of their freedoms over the years. Humans have a knack for denial, even in the face of obvious disaster.

I guess you could say I had the same mentality; everything will work out fine. Most people denied a revolution was coming. I buried my head in the proverbial sand. I could not watch television, thumb endlessly through social media, or discuss current events over increasingly expensive dinners, without needing to take a Valium. At least we still had a variety of overpriced restaurants to choose from back then, before no one could afford to maintain a business. Not to mention the mass closures from non-conformance with the government’s war directives. I digress, my blissful ignorance was self-induced. I sold my television, kept only the laptop I needed for work, and removed my presence from multiple social media services. Such an action made me a leper to many people.

“But how do you know when people get engaged, have been on European holidays, or had a gender reveal?” I would get asked.

“No one posts about that stuff anymore,” I would reply. “And besides, Europe is just a continent that mostly hates us now.”

Oh sure, for a time that is all your friends, family, and colleagues would post about. They had a choice of online platforms in which to relentlessly brag about their lives. We all took it for granted, even though we complained about the obnoxiousness of it all. Eventually, visions of joyous life events thinned out. I would have given anything to once again see meticulously staged poses in front of foreign landmarks, instead of the never-ending stream of truths hidden underneath layers of theories and personal opinions. The news of the world became a jigsaw puzzle. Only all the pieces came from different boxes, and everyone knew it. Still, they smashed the pieces together with their fists to make some horror version of the true picture. I guess some people slept more soundly when the government took all the competing services offline and replaced them with their single and morally acceptable, ‘Truth Stream.’ I can still remember arguing about some nauseating story from The Stream with an equally ridiculous coworker.

“Well, it has to be true,” she said.

“How can you be so naïve?” I replied. “That site is nothing but bullshit propaganda.”

“But then why do they call it the Truth Stream?” The conversation did not go much beyond that. You could get reported for that kind of talk.

Society used to have this concept called free speech. A term hideously overused by idiots. It was supposed to mean that people were allowed to have differing views on everything from religion, sex, relationships, the cost of eggs, and even government policy. You would not dare speak out about such things in some parts of the country in those final days. Especially if your viewpoint differed from what The Stream conditioned you to think, not unless you wanted some stale beer-breathed thug to beat you down in broad daylight, all whilst declaring their righteous allegiance to the flag, and God. These people believed that their government waging a war with the nations of this continent that sandwiched our own, had their best interests at heart. You would be surprised who people will follow when the cost of simply living becomes a challenge for the majority. They start to believe that their lives can be improved by picking fights with neighbours over mundane differences of opinion. At least those battles did not stretch resources like those happening overseas. By the time every citizen had been forced to consume their information from the Truth Stream, their minds could be twisted to believe anything. It is as if that hideous website somehow reached directly into people’s brains, found the wires that decrypted common sense, and yanked them all out. Even friends whom I had aligned with for years, began to believe that invading small island nations was the only way back to prosperity. The cancer of stupidity multiplied across the population, mutating one mind, and spreading rapidly to the next.

Everyone became convinced that our nation was the centre of the universe. That anyone who did not look, speak, pray, and love a certain way, was degenerate. People from all walks of life who had performed lifesaving jobs were spat on in the street. All because they did not want to marry the opposite gender. Or perhaps they did not fit into a gender box that conformed with what The Stream said was ‘natural.’

“There is only one god, and he is coming for you,” a balaclava-wearing stranger in a thrift shop army uniform screamed at me once. I dared to not accept his pamphlet about the one true deity. We somehow forgot that the Earth was made up of many cultures and religions. It was bad enough if you did not believe in their god. Look out if you dared not believe at all.

The thing is history has a funny way of repeating itself. You cannot force millions of people into unquestioning loyalty forever. Not without killing off all those who oppose the single narrative. Sure, they tried. Sure, we resisted. We lived in a digital age where enough people were handy enough with computers to find ways around The Stream. People abandoned it in droves and found other ways to communicate. The so-called degenerates banded together in dark alleys both physical and digital. Elements of government that had opposed the rise of the ruling autocracy maintained a dialogue. And before we knew it, a fresh war waged on our soil. The revolution had begun, and a brave new nation was born.