Consequences of Apathy
 

 

It didn't have to be this way; but it is.  Always people think of a time better than the present.  They also seem to imagine a future far more bleak than the present.  It is presumed by quite a few that the world would be a better place if only the right people were in charge.  Still though, there is at least one in every group that believes otherwise.

 

That one is me.  I'm Reuben Kristopher Veichaft.  Most people just call me Kris.  Except my wife; she calls me tasty sandwich sometimes on account of her love of the sandwich associated with my moniker.  She doesn't do that so much of late.  Her mood has been rather empty of any joy after martial law was imposed almost two years ago now.

 

Some days I can't help but to escape the despair she is filled with.  So I leave early in the mornings to walk.  Mornings like this one, cold, windy, and unforgiving.  Often I feel ashamed of myself.  I always remember what I promised, for better or worse; in sickness and in health.  I'm not a perfect husband.  I know that all too well.

 

No matter my faults not loving her is not one of them.  No one can say with a shred of honesty that I don't love my wife.  I do.  What I don't know how to do is to rid myself of all of the despair I am constantly filled with.  I face my own fears daily; but through some act of God or nature or whatever it is I have been crafted to be a receptacle for the despair belonging to others.

 

I don't know how it happened; or why.  All I know is that it happened.  It's made me hide from others.  It's made me almost hate everyone but myself.  Yet by that logic I end up hating myself because I shouldn't hate everyone else for what has happened to me.  It's a curse.  I try to control it but it doesn't work like everything else I instinctually know how to do.  I pray that in time I will be able to tune out the thoughts that aren't mind like I tuned out the voices of others talking around me while I read in at the park, along the river.

 

It's been a trying three years since this started.  I can't believe that I'm alone with this curse.  I hope not.  On second thought I hope I am.  Maybe I don't know what to hope for.  All I know is that these walks give me piece in my mind.  People have to be close and conscientiously thinking about something for me to hear.  How lucky for me that people here don't get up so early.  I guess they are just too afraid to be caught.

 

Maybe I'm overly confident but I can hear the MPs coming miles away.  Always these goons from the city seem to have the same mindset.  It must be nice to be so confident.  They get a fat paycheck and fabulous living accommodations for roughing us down here in the gutter of little tri-state area.  The more morals people are willing to throw away directly equates to a higher number of financial rewards it seems.

 

The disasters that struck most of North American in the spring and summer of 2017 seemed to be endless.  An earthquake on the West Coast, severe thunderstorms and multiple EF-5 tornados in the Midwest, a heat wave with temps soaring above 110 for weeks at a time throughout much of the South, a category five hurricane hit the New England coast in early August, and the icing on the cake was the alleged attempt to shoot up the White House the week after New England began to see the magnitude of Nature's fury.  I wish more had seen it coming.  I did.  I remember the day martial law was declared nationwide.  Indianapolis tried to resist but fell flat.  The president simply sent troops to Indy and that was that.  An instant puppet government was formed and most of those around me never saw it coming.

 

Almost two million people died that year to natural disasters.  Panic and fear was everywhere.  I took my wife and daughter out of our little apartment and hid in the woods.  She hated me for that.  She wanted to stay but I knew better.  That week our apartment was raided.  ATF and Homeland Security agents broke in looking for the rifles I purchased a few years ago.  I heard from old neighbors that they had a warrant for my arrest.

 

So far they haven't found me.  I know what they were really looking.  They looted my home something fierce looking for me and information concerning contacts I had in the years leading up to that point.  They knew I had contact with individuals who are now open resisters; who are now in open rebellion with the feds.