The Memory
And then, there is the feeling of doing what is pleasing. It is possible there is something about memory--how things should have been. Possibly, a single idea (a meme?) emerging as different iterations, causing everything to build and unravel simultaneously. Yes, group think (collective bargaining?) is the perfect ploy for theMunicipality to game-entice theory systems(G.E.T.S.). True, people held their own, bringing individual wants, one by one, to the meetings, of course, no one knowing (or later would remember) the exact moment the deterioration occurred. TheHumans had inadvertently set in motion the growth laser activated mobility outlining underlying regressions(G.L.A.M.O.U.R.)), though no one recognized it exactly as that. Their individual, disciplined, thinking had already begun to wane, wanting outsourced money entering now(W.O.M.E.N.) as a source of happiness; they had resisted any urge to just move along; instead, the greedy regression activated connective entity(G.R.A.C.E.) would simply elect a new leader every year, moving toward a more costly and restrictive retiree enabled liability advanced planning system enforcer(R.E.L.A.P.S.E.), long enough for workers to begin to sense the huge, slowly at first, raising of taxes(R.O.T.) and cutting of service tempo(C.O.S.T.). They'd subscribed to some fancy pension plan duly administered by, at first, small new active financial unions(S.N.A.F.U.) with a highly recognizable name, one of the Founding Fathers, or some such. In the ensuing years, they'd have the state trackers intervene newly knowledgeable(S.T.I.N.K.), and put the whole town in receivership, with bankruptcy documents laying unsigned in the Central Courthouse, even to this day, where it stays, seemingly forever; while people, (or should I say the individualists) got in their cars and drove out of town, not to return, possibly forever: they simply left.
They came in so many, seemingly endless, numbers in the beginning that the rise of the immigrant community seemed almost inevitable. It never felt so difficult to survive living in poverty, to pay public worker labor costs (that could swamp anyone's budget). Sure, they enjoy their Mom and Pop Shops, at least the ones left behind--it was the retirees receiving 50% of their final years salary that caused receivers and judges, seemingly, all across the continent to fix the finances. It could be another example, and quite possibly so, that the towns have literally become virtual, existing only in the mainframes of giant computer server networks inside architectures (strewn?) across old cow pastures left over from the shrinking herds of early 21stCentury: sliding across the boundaries of doing what they please, and a more structured, continual, honest, propping up of social protocol. It's as if the laws of probability and the laws of regression have simply merged into one all-consuming algorithm--there in those little towns at the near dawning of the 22ndCentury. The battle happened so fast--talkative nature of communism, giving all those noisy speeches and such, and the quiet solitude of simple logic, Einstein-like. True, the State has taken over the difficult task of running the schools (from afar?) and, the minimum staffing requirements of collective bargaining have gotten themselves outlawed, and yet, the police officers still run those little towns--retirees all--on their shiny minted, high paying, disability pension plans, in much the same way the homeless of the later 20thCentury pretended to be, well, homeless. You see, it seems now, property tax is all that's left to tax and, (remember those police retirees on their disability pension plans?) old cops patrol the schools now; the teachers, it seems, will not discipline their students, the few students who have chosen to remain in school. Still, the people fly the flag of their little towns, their memories they were once allowed to have (how could they have been taken away?) since youth, and never once wonder about those imaginary boundaries got crossed. They will simply want to stay there, with the memory.