The yard in front of the house had become a mud pit every time the yard thawed at mid-day. There weren’t many rocks around, but he had suddenly recalled small slabs of asphalt working loose up on the roadway, in spite of the repaving being new. The traffic was gone. Nobody drove out here anymore since the bridge collapsed, and there were no funds to replace it. It was probably the same shoddy contract work which produced the new pavement and new bridge. And there was really nothing to see out here, so it was hardly a tourist destination. It had always been a place to pass through on the way to some other place. That’s probably why he could afford the price of the old farm well back off the highway, using the money he had saved while serving in the military.
The cold wind was his only companion as he scanned for the closest loose chunk of the brittle black surface. There, on the opposite side, at the edge of a pothole — a pair of cracks running back from the edge almost met. A couple of gentle taps at first, bumping the outer edge to get a leverage point with the pickax. Then, stepping around to the other side, he wrapped both gloved hands around the end of the handle and pulled. It resisted a moment, then popped up with an odd sound.
It was about three fingers thick, as he had expected. What he had not expected was what lay beneath. Instead of the battered concrete of previous paving jobs, it was almost a thin sheet something not quite cement. It was more durable, showing little of the scratches it should have had from his working with the pickax. His curiosity got the best of him, and he worked loose a few more slabs of frozen asphalt, which he would have eventually done anyway.
Eventually he had uncovered a panel of this odd material. With the edges exposed, he dug around a bit, found it was very heavy, but could be moved. He hadn’t worked this hard since last spring, when the tiny, one-wheeled plow broke and he had to turn the whole garden with a spade. The flat edge of the pickax was almost too thick to wedge it down along the edge of the panel and the ones adjacent, but he finally got it up enough to drag away from it’s place. It was too heavy to actually lift, but some clever twisting and pulling of the pickax and some gravel to make it roll, and he was able to slide it over like a lid.
What he saw underneath froze him colder than any winter wind which blew across this rolling plain. It was the top of a car. It had been crushed flat, but not like the ones you could find in derelict salvage yards down toward the now empty town. This had been pretty new, but squashed by something with cleats, like a bulldozer. Because of the haphazard folding of the top, there was a portion where a section of the front seat was exposed — and finger bones.
At first, he was shocked, then wondered what sort of skulduggery got somebody killed this way and buried under a road project. As the days slipped by while he collected more slabs of asphalt, as much out of curiosity about his find as actual need, he reassembled the chunks into a very nice patio and drive. All the while, he managed to lift more of the strange panels and the numbness set in as he found more cars. Apparently they had been smashed in place, because they neatly filled the space under the panels. The cleat marks indicated multiple passes over the entire road bed, which had been filled and built up over these crushed cars, three across. All the while, he kept detecting a faint odor his unconscious mind recognized, but not as a normal smell of human burial, with or without proper mortuary processing.
One night, he woke with a start, covered in sweat and tears. The smell. In his dreams he saw the helicopters dropping canisters over the Afghan villages which had the misfortune of being inside enemy territory. The containers dropped to about 20 feet above ground, shattered into fragments and releasing a heavy, descending mist. Wherever the mist drifted, flesh quickly fell away from bones and the screams died away surprisingly fast. In a few hours, it was safe to send ground teams through with no apparent ill effects to collect what few weapons and intelligence items might exist. Only that odd, faint smell lingered.
All those crushed cars with skeletal remains, the symbol of crushed lives, used to fill a low spot for a road. What lies had been told to explain their disappearance? Whom could he tell? Whom would he ask about it? And who would believe it?
That very night found him struggling in the blistering cold to lever all those panels back into place.
Here in the US, we are so deeply surrounded by lies, it’s hard to explain. Sometimes it is the facts which are outlandish.
The very ground under our feet, as it were, hides a vast cavern of hidden truth. We can’t imagine how bad it really is, because all the noise we hear, and the sights we see, coming from those we trust to tell us what is going on is staged half-truths. While most news reports are factual, it’s what they leave out, buried out of sight, which makes it all a huge lie. It’s huge, too audacious to imagine. We pass over it every day without wondering what’s hidden, because everything conspires to reduce our skepticism. About the only way to find out is to find ourselves with a target painted on us.
No one in this world is innocent. All are fallen. If every law and rule were enforced, every breathing human would be under sentence, even in the earthly sense. When we view the justice system from a broad scope, we find the only real purpose is keeping the people cowed before government. Should it be human frailty causes no real harm to anyone else, but simply presents a challenge to government prerogatives, those sentences are harshest. Those who fall under such harsh justice realize clearly the word “justice” is a complete misnomer. These will tell you we are all in prison already.
You are told stories by the press and mouthpieces of the system how justly these wretches deserve their punishment. It seems plausible, until you become one of them, and discover how completely false is the image painted. And to all appearances, the people who paint those false images truly believe the falsehood they promote. So twisted is the mind which serves the system, it is utterly alien to those of us outside it. When someone who has frankly done no injustice to others finds himself crushed under the system, there is nothing left but to embrace the identity of criminal. A few will embrace true evil, but most simply realize it’s another name for “slave.” The difference is, they sense the chains, while most of us do not. They can do nothing right, so there’s nothing to gain by being careful to avoid confrontation with the State. The government mouthpieces call this “recidivism.”
For those who simply cannot believe this has become the reality in the US, you are the most pitiful of slaves. When the mindless bulldozer of the State runs across your life, it will probably be too late to realize. It was never about the needs of the governed, but the convenience of the bureaucrats who cannot imagine the needs of others. This is not simply an anarchist point of view, since I certainly have a clear idea of government as God intended it. Indeed, my objections are entirely biblical. The biblical response is not so much to fight back, but also not to condemn those who do fight back.
America, the largest prison on Planet Earth.
