THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

The 2010's

My first ten years in the Forces flew by in the blink of an eye. I was going to turn 28. People my age and younger were just beginning to discover the wonders of social media: the universe at our fingertips. This is how I reconnected with Chris. He had left Cuba too. Before returning to England, he had travelled in Asia for two years. He had obtained a Master's degree in International Business from the University of Cambridge then he had found a job in a large company in London. To him too, language skills had borne fruit on his professional tree.

Like just about everyone, I didn't question the information that the media provided me with all day long. After all, I had more important things to do: my career advancement, my daily life as a troubled man, my gaping and still painful wounds. I was listening to the news every day without questioning the trajectory of the big ship on which I had embarked like a slave on a slave ship: stunned by the violence of my capture, totally unaware of my new destination, comforted by the presence and the warmth of the bodies of my captive brothers and sisters. I remained chained in fear of discovering what I had always known deep within me: we were crossing this ocean of pain in order to overcome our greatest fear; nothingness. When we lose everything, what more can we fear, but the fear of forgetting who we truly are?

I felt overwhelmed. Like most of the population worldwide, I was drowning in the tide of information and catastrophe scenarios that were continuously slumping onto my small and large flat screens. So much so that I didn't even attempt to try to understand the real purpose of so many images, and so many words onto the human mind. Looking back, I now realise that we were actually under attack. We were being indoctrinated until we became accustomed to the misfortune that some powerful people had set in store for us. Yet, in their mad rush toward almighty power over all lives, they had designed the fate of Humanity. The perfect weapon they had created was to turn against them as well as mankind, while sparing all other forms of lives. As events kept unfolding month after month, year after year, the obedient slave that I was still didn't grasp what my real chains were. I wasn't being held to the horror of my servitude and my tragic destiny by my wrists or ankles. In fact, my chains had always been to my ignorant coward man's mind.

From global warming, the media had moved on to climate change, making a lot of noise while doing as little as possible. The developed countries at the root cause of the problem were calling on the developing countries to stop their economic catch-up class to give the planet a break. The wealthy and influential men of the world started to blame the commoner who ate red meat. Then, the dietary best practice shifted to vegetarianism and veganism because it was supposedly cows with the grass they chewed on that polluted our water and our beautiful land. Everyone seemed to turn a blind eye on the pesticides and genetically modified products the wealthy and influential men had been forcing on farmers and the human body for decades. After a few years, cows became the number two enemy of planet Earth after carbon emission and before mankind. Indeed, there were more and more people on the planet: the old, the young, the not so young, but above all the old ones, far too many elderlies. As a result, the planet suffered under our weight, or perhaps the economy of consumerism could no longer tolerate so many retired consumers. Something had to be done to surely but slowly resolve the issue. 

But how to eliminate the old, and why not also some of the others since there were so many of them, while pushing the progress of medical research at the same time? 

By making more people sick inadvertently, treating them with negligence, then making them even sicker. The cycle was to keep going tirelessly to continue spinning the infernal wheel which made the human body completely stupid while making the pharmaceutical industry rich. Cancer and heart diseases quickly became the enemy number one and two of the modern men, but not of the poor men. The latter was still dying of malnutrition, malaria, polio, and other curable diseases decades prior. Luckily for planet Earth, it didn't eat sugar or carbs either. It took only a decade for the well-thinking elite to find the big idea that didn't suit anyone except themselves. They introduced their brilliant idea to us in the 2020's a bit like putting a new-born baby into her mother's arms: There! It's yours. Basically, we had no choice. Urgency and fear would soon become their favourite weapons of mass destruction, making us swallow instantly a whole new order of thought: no need to think anymore, the world's greatest people would take care of everything for us with their advanced technology.

They were also talking about China becoming the next global superpower, which gave a fright to the white societies. Would they all turn yellow? The world of the early 2000s wasn't much different from the one of the late 2000s. The men at the top of the human pile still saw colours very clearly while pretending not to see them. The sole purpose of such behaviour consisted of being seen well by the very group they couldn't care less about. But since there were so many of them, they couldn't be ignored, at least not yet. It was also around that time that western societies began to categorise and put individuals into baskets, making sure to have enough special containers to put everyone in. It seemed like we all had to have one or two at most. Each taste, each choice, each trend had its own, even though strangely enough sexes and genders had disappeared. 

I was gasping at the thought of having to find a basket where to squeeze myself in. Despite the exciting new debates generated by the categorical classification of the original diversity of the human species as well as the newly found open-mindedness about human sexuality, I took a very dim view of this new fashion. All those big baskets displayed in line like army soldiers. In my opinion, this tendency constituted the means to create yet another perfect ideology to judge and divide people. Besides, I didn't see the world in single sized containers; I saw it rather like a field of wildflowers, free, and marvellous in all the immensity of its splendour. Obviously, those who had launched the trend didn't want to see us free. On the contrary, they wanted to confine us to rigid definitions so as never to let us out of them. Because of my upbringing, or upbringings rather, as well as the different languages I understood and spoke fluently, those fancy, very carefully chosen words, new words, words that belonged to some other men's troubled minds, made no difference to my condition. But again, who was I to even question the new terminology of my own kind? 

The world revolved around the west like the Earth around the sun, letting itself be guided by their ingenious new ideas, their science, and their technology. Western leaders listened to no one but themselves, the huge multinationals, and the few opportunist philanthropists that sponsored them globally. However, there was every reason to believe that China would soon wreck all of that with its economic miracle and its foreign values. With a little more ingenuity, science, and technology, maybe the West could thwart it and maintain its hegemony for several more centuries. Mankind had invented an infernal machine with no stop button. In this mad race for success, the human species seemed to omit only one thing: how to stop if necessary?