And I Wait

If you had asked me how the world would end I never would have, in my wildest dreams, guessed it’d be a bull… I am getting ahead of myself. Bulls, and greed, and bears, oh my!

Everyone had bet on climate change, and in a way, they were right, it will finish the job, but it’s not even close to what finally brought society as we know it to its knees.

To tell this story right I guess I should back up about six months. There was a virus. Crazy innit? How that’s not the thing that took us down either. All these toxic components tossed in the mixing bowl and it’s a damn bull…but I am getting ahead of myself again.

So, there was this virus. It wasn’t even a particularly deadly virus as far as global plagues go. It was a starter pandemic, and the fact that we couldn’t, as a global society, handle even that should have been enough writing on the wall but alas…it wasn’t. Why, you might ask, was it so hard to handle a baby pandemic? I’ll give you a guess…you there yet…yup, bulls.

Bulls are majestic creatures; strong, sleek, powerful. They are fearsome when mistreated or when defensive. Contrariwise, they are loving when treated well and protective of their herd. Rarely do they attack unless provoked and boy do we like to provoke them. Everyone thought it would be the bear, we even have a saying cautioning against provoking one. Rather, we just couldn’t help, to borrow a phrase and rework it to my purpose, to poke the bull instead.

You might wonder where I am going with all this pretentious pontificating (praise me for my alliteration) and I am getting there I promise. Right now in fact. Six months ago the virus was raging unchecked, the vaccines had failed, and while most weren’t dying, enough were to make the whole thing horribly tragic in its preventibility. The market had bulls running all up and down the Nasdaq and traders were ecstatic. See where I am going yet? No? Bull markets are good things yes? Right…? How could a booming economy cause the end of the world as we know it?

Well, since you asked, here we go, the real meat (you might say bull meat) of our tale. Ya know, now that I think of it, maybe I should have said cards caused the end of the world. Another vague reference I will entrust my esteemed reader to suss out for themselves.

Anyhoo, tangent, back to the bull run on Wall Street. Business was booming, stocks were up up up and no one was asking any questions. With half the country out of work, sick, dying, or dead how did we manage to have such a prosperous return on our investments you might ask…and yet no one really did. We all wanted so desperately to return to “normal” we never stopped to realize nothing about before had been normal at all.

We all muddled along, like lemmings, blindly being lead to a cliff edge by the wealthy elite who all had hidden parachutes. Society had been rotting from the inside for along time, think dry rot in floorboards, the outside might be shiny and new looking but the inside is crawling with termites and decay. Some started to notice this finally and that’s when they sent their best weapons against us…ourselves. We were all so busy fighting each other we never even saw the real enemy…or if we did, we didn’t feel enough self-righteousness to go after them…besides it didn’t get as many views and likes on social media anyway.

The bulls ran through the streets, trampling those their masters deemed unimportant enough to be sacrificed on the alter of their greed. And there it is, the crux of it, the real demise of everything…greed. Greed of the elite for money and power, greed of the little people for online validation and brownie points, greed of the masses for more and more and more distraction and gossip and turmoil so we never had to look under the surface and see the rot.

The bulls gave way to the bears and now we sit in a golden city on a hill turned to ash and bone. Like a house of…wait for it…cards! Did you figure it out? Like a house of cards it all came tumbling down on us killing more people than I would ever be able to count.

Now we sit and wait…there’s no going back and there is no going forward. Our water is contaminated, our food sources poisoned, temperatures are rising and half the world is on fire while the other half drowns in floods and rising sea levels.

As far as the end goes at least I have a nice view. The sun is setting behind smog and smoke casting a deep red orange across the waves in the ocean. The too hot sand refusing to cool beneath my toes, I watch, and I wait. I take a deep breath of smoke and ash and think of the majestic bull…how far we have fallen…and I wait.