Idealism Vandalized: Christopher Delicino enters our contest

Oh! Nail-biting Literati!

Here is the first entry this evening, from fellow Muscovite Christopher Delicino. Do I detect the youthful idealism of a Vandal?  (University of Idaho brethren and sisterns refer to themselves as Vandals, as in “The pump don’t work ’cause the Vandals took the handles”–Bob Dylan)

Christopher is one of five (?) competitors from Moscow in our contest. Please make him feel welcome and give him the Peggy Dobbs’  kind of encouragement to make him the best writer he can be.  His story is missing a title, so I will give it one.  Just a few blocks from here is

Friendship Square

by Christopher Delicino

Heat exhaustion is avoidable. There are websites with descriptions on it. They need updating. Bullets are provided however to whom is most at risk: The elderly, The dehydrated, Children, The Obese, The pregnant, Alcoholics, Pill poppers, disabled, weak, and the physical laborers. If all you need is time to recover, why is heat exhaustion the cause for many deaths? Paired with this question is a yet more unsettling question: Who are the people who die?

Clicking on the television recalls the news channel that’s left on permanently. Lately there’s been better news on. Recently, better news that appeals to the majority instead of the minority. News of a selective draft targeting household names: Chairmen of brand names, 1%ers, and politicians. Guess what they’re doing? Sending their candy asses to Bali, China, and other Superfund sights to pick up trash, indefinitely. The new leader of the free people made his speech yesterday. The TV was on and the people were watching him speak and following every word. “ Now is the time for the balance that will do away with all the sickness and trash the last two hundred years have accumulated”… Remembering the air having been filled with righteous indignity, the TV just convened the feeling of being born into this world of trash and watching it fill up until the tipping point has avalanches the new revolution of intuition. Now, we are changed. Now, each and every one of us has a chance to listen with clarity to the simple yet irrefutable complex needs of each one of our minds, bodies, and souls. Eating this up was never so easy.

Making a change started with the simple and complex balance we all needed. “Growth of the individual has always been the national debt which we are millions of people short of…I swear, it‘s not too late” He spoke dressed in what looked like cotton garments, plain brown and off white that plead sincerity of his status. This statement from a TV was unprecedented.

All eyes that managed to share this moment were assuredly glued to screens everywhere. “This will be the only thing this speaker feels the need to speak as an authority, tomorrow I would work alongside my community with a shovel, and sit in meditative prayer with all people of all faiths. Do good and Be good is the creed today, tomorrow and the rest of my time here .” Hearing motto’s and words like creed was uncomfortable until today. It’s a slogan heard before that resulted in the perpetuation of the dogmatic empire-based lie that some acquired wealth by god’s decree and most could not afford most comparably less growth or stability, or potential to influence the world. The TV spoke on, “The shackles of saturated doing are broken, our gift to the future. My recommendation, to build on your selves, your communities, your lands. This simple cultivation is a need as real as human beings are. Thank you for listening and think for yourselves. Good day.” The response to this filled no rooms with hate chattering and division. The needs were too many to needlessly divide at this point. Those who spent their life in bitterness who wouldn’t adapt were gifted with another opportunity not spoken about by this short term leader. Some of us would volunteer, too, to pick up the trash, as managers to the outcast and be their living hell, as our bitterness would nominate us the perfect sword with which to punish the overly-profited by this catastrophe.

To be a teacher and watch the future drown in the futilely challenged falsities, to be a carpenter to contract and construct the vessels of poisoned food to dope the indoctrinated past ways of thought and belief. To be a doctor of the mind and attempt and fail the tide of sick people on their couches. This had been too much for most of their lives, making them the only people fit to make hell on earth for the profiteers. They volunteer and were not drafted. The hardships of the past made the hardships of martyrdom palatable.

The boat ride for many was a time to find a common end for their sacrifice. The draft that would take place over the next month was the time to take advantage of knowing the work site and the tools and feasibly being the managers to the drafted which would arrive soon thereafter. Upon seeing the relieved at the work site, the malnourished , the poor, the hungry and the sick, volunteers came together to put their bitterness that brought them there to a plan. The drafted would work, until they were malnourished, heat exhausted, and broken. Some one had to pick up the garbage, some one had to die doing so.