“Volatile,” Alan echoed, looking fascinated. “How so?”
“In every way I can come up with,” she said plainly. “I suppose you could say our standard of living was generally normal. Overall, we lived a good life, whatever that meant then, and we were blessed to have everything we needed. But there were times when it felt like everything was imploding around us. No matter how hard we worked, it felt impossible to get ahead. We both had good jobs, but you were the breadwinner, always working, never home during the week. Pay raises came, but food costs, living expenses and taxes swallowed them up. Being in debt became routine, but it was always so stressful for both of us; in fact, almost all our arguments were over money then.”
Michelle took a contemplative pause. “You and I used to be regular social butterflies until mutual friends we’d had for years became distant for no apparent reason, and we never did figure out why. Our neighbors acted friendly, but kept to themselves mostly and never spent any time outside unless they were mowing their lawns or walking their dogs. Everywhere we went, there was this…overall sense of division and isolation; easy to feel but so difficult to describe, as if humankind were slowly and quietly being manipulated to think of itself as undesirable.” She exhaled. “And then there was the news.”
Alan squinted. “The news?”
“Mass media.” Michelle nodded. “If humankind was being manipulated, that conglomerate of truth bending was the likely culprit. Media could get to everyone, everywhere—through television, computers, our phones, cars, the watches on our wrists, you name it. And they only reported what sold, drew harmful reaction, or caused more division. All negative, never anything positive or good, all of it politically skewed in a radical sense one way or the other. Radio was the same; in lieu of music, it was crammed with talk shows and commentary, intertwined with repetitive commercials, most of them political. Nothing good ever seemed to be happening anywhere in the world, just poverty, oppression, destruction, war, violence, terrorism and death, people killing each other for the stupidest reasons…famine, disease, pandemics…the list was endless. So many things wrong and not enough right, so much happening in ways it wasn’t supposed to. You used to say the news was a propaganda superhighway designed to divide and subjugate a nation of useful idiots, which, looking back, it did a damn good job of it.”
Michelle leaned back and stretched. “There was so much hopelessness for people to dwell on then. But something else was happening all over the world beneath the surface, unaffected by propaganda, and you helped open my eyes to it. The silent majority was no longer silent, they’d begun making their voices heard for the first time in decades. People were rising up at an unprecedented rate. There were rebellions, protests and riots everywhere; citizens opposing unfair laws, law enforcement and unjust government rule. China, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, to name a few. The migrant crisis in Europe was abuzz, as were the yellow vests in France. I remember Lauren showing me videos of protests in Tehran…the Iranian government had instructed their military to gun down hundreds in the streets, and all they’d wanted was their freedom and to be heard.”
At this point, Alan stopped all work and brushed the dirt from his hands. “Wow. When you said volatile, you weren’t joking.”
“Tell me about it. There were days when it was downright scary,” Michelle went on. “It was an election year, and the entire country was picking sides, all in an uproar over the candidates. There was so much hate abound. It was like a soap opera, and the politicians were the actors, but not even good ones. They would fight and argue and point fingers, put on a show—doing whatever they needed to secure votes, all while running the country into the ground. You used to tell me how much of a lie it all was, that politics was just another massive façade put in place to obscure the truth, and that the world was ruled by other means. And, of course, I didn’t want to believe you. I had a hard time believing anything you said back then.
“You always had this…alternative way of looking at everything. It intrigued me, made me curious at times, but it also pissed me off.” A pause. “I was happy back then in my ignorance. I didn’t want to know anything more than what existed on the surface. We were just grains of sand on a big round ball of dirt that circles the sun; who were we to question anything we were told? I never thought we were meant to know everything, get to the bottom, or be privy to every detail. That was you, and I wasn’t you. But that never stopped you from trying. There were times when I got mad and forced you away, not because of what you were telling me, but because I didn’t want to know—I kept telling myself I didn’t need to know. The truth, the real truth, the things you knew because you had to, it all scared the shit out of me.
“There were challenges in our home state, too, that year. A new majority took over in Richmond, and no sooner had they won their elections than they begun pre-filing a ton of reformist bills, most of them drastic. They kept coming one after another and seemed to get worse as days passed. You were so stressed out, especially when the anti-gun bills started coming to light. They aimed to either ban everything or tax it into extinction, even rifles you’d
