There’s no planet labelled B.
Instead, we live on a planet labelled D…. Dystopia.
I once thought a dystopian society was one ruled by anarchists. It turns out I was wrong. A dystopian society is one led by zombies and again, zombies are not what I expected either, they’re fully fledged humans behaving as sheep, bleating their way through pastures.
In this dystopian society, national broadcasters receive letters about ill-judged showings of such movies as The Railway Children, for fear it will encourage children to play around train tracks. At the same time, such parents are busy buying smart phones for children as young as six, allowing these youngsters watch whatever it is a child can find online, be it porn, how to rob your neighbour, or how to use a knife to maim. Those same children, if they’re not busy learning something, they’re hooking up with their local drug dealer.
Then there’s the teenagers, a generation known to be more climate conscious than their elders, a generation addicted to smart devices and screens, gobbling and guzzling energy as though cans of Red Bull.
And back to the adults again, the ones desperately trying to have it all, when having it all is an impossible myth. But being the sheep they are, they still attempt to achieve it, as they keep up with social media giants quest to earn profits and follow those faked pictures of perfect homes and bodies, their hours filled with the chase for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, their heads a mess of noise and their thoughts millstones of wants and needs and must haves and must dos.
Their lungs screaming to breathe. For those with children, parenting becomes an acquired social status, the work involved in the word forgotten, as their children live their lives loosely.
As for our environments, our towns and streets are littered with drug paraphernalia, boxing matches, thuggery, vigilantism, and our rural havens are dumping grounds for unwanted goods people decide too bothersome to deal with morally, not to mention our drug-soaked rivers and streams, where even the fish are becoming addicts.
By Marie H. Curran