Rebellion was a bandage. Faux pacifism. Faux veganism. Faux anti-establishmentism. And rebellion has died away with an eternal, never ending scream.
In the dark net, outrage cries out over every child shot dead by police. Tears are wept over massacres of entire towns that will never make the news. Love is offered to our children as they die of abuse and of isolation.
But even as we rise up. Even as Occupy takes the street. Even as Fergison shakes the country. Even as we cry out in outrage, it is too late. Because senators with a two percent approval rating gain fifty one percent of the vote. Because the right to buy politicians is ruled to be Freedom of Speech. Because even as gay men and women gain the right to marry, they still lack the right not to be fired from their jobs for it.
No, faux rebellion of the hippies and the punks, it has died away. Outrage and indignity claiming the place where ideology and politics once stood. And the huddled masses have nothing left but to cry out and shake their impotent fists at a world that is even now heating up. That is even now dying. Knowing that no matter how loudly they scream, it will not prevent their children from dying in their arms, killed by the poisons that we are even now too late to stop from killing us.
Stories of the dystopian future are no longer warnings, but simply stories that allow us to understand the world in which we have come to live. The Hunger Games parallel the corporate control of our media, 1984 parallels the war on Drugs and Terror, Brave New World parallels our current consumption of ADHD Drugs and Anti-Depressants. The Dystopian warnings of yesterday have become a grim allegory of our present.
Token members of society fight the current. Protest. Refuse to take part. And their motions are no longer even considered newsworthy. Are written out of history with the stroke of a pen and a few dollars changing hands. This, while the world finds new ways to embrace the ID, to avoid thinking about what must be to come, in new cannibalistic fantasies of The Purge, in Serial Rampages of Taken, in Fetishistic Sado-Masochism of 50 Shades and of The Saw #6.
And while at any other time I would be dancing at society finally embracing its shadow impulses, this too is a distraction. A corporate tactic to numb and redirect the masses. Turning righteous outrage inward, to darker, more primeval places.
And though we can warn the world, though we have been warning it for decades, it is already too late to stop. Too late to halt this end. And if dystopian fantasies are now the alagories of our time, then let us turn to Terminator. For our destiny was never to stop judgement day. It is simply to survive it.
And maybe, in dying, we may begin again.
Death, death to the image. And with it, ourselves.