I'm disappointed. I thought this was going to be the summer we all died at the hands of Big Brother, but he doesn't seem to have arrived, or even shown his hand. You don't suppose we were... mistaken? (or just bloody paranoid)

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It's Noon on September 1st as I write these words on my laptop, wondering why I'm here to do this at all.

According to unconventional wisdom – supposedly the best barometer of what's really happening now – I shouldn't be here right now. I should be dead, somewhere: shot in the back of the head, lined up against the wall, gassed in an alley, or otherwise “euthanized” like all those people on the 9/11 planes that never really hit anything at all.

And yet I feel so alive?

Either that or incarcerated in a camp, or on the way to one? Somewhere out west there's a FEMA bunk, just waiting for little old me, or so they said. Where oh where could my gun-enforced ticket to the re-education resort be? I was so ready to chuck the bills and the job and spend my days on the government dime, too.

Maybe it got lost in the mail?

And yet here I sit, sipping coffee and typing away. So I can't help but wonder what's gone wrong, now. Or if there was ever anything THAT wrong to begin with, come to think of it.

It wouldn't be the first time we got misled by “friends in the know.”

You see, we got told, back in May and June, by certain persons (that you know all too well) that this was going to be THE Summer. It was all going to come down the pipe between THIS June and August. Just like it was supposed to come down the pipe the previous year's summer, and the year before that, and the year before that, too.

Seeing a pattern yet?

The evil master plans of the people who really rule the world were going to be put into operation, and we were all gonna die. Engineered plagues, economic meltdown, concentration camps, wars and rumors of wars, stormtroopers in the streets, Nazi flying saucers in the sky.

The Summer of evoL, come to get us with a big, hungry mouth...

And yet here we all are? Did something go wrong, then? Plans go awry? The plague isn't ready to roll out? The stormtroopers are wondering why the purple kool-aid looks a little off? The economic downturn is turning around, however slowly? Too many people made too much noise about the camps, even if they aren't there at all?

The Nazis suddenly realize they DON'T have a working flying saucer after all?

Well, count me bummed out. I mean, if you can't trust the paranoid, doom and gloom naysayers to tell you the world's coming to an end, who CAN you trust? I thought it was all over except for the screaming, darn it.

It's almost as if we got misled.

Who are these peddlers of doom and gloom, anyway? Do they have a chain of restaurants where I can go order the Horror special? Is there a school I can go to that'll teach me to go online and warn people of make-believe dangers that only I can see?

Is there a paycheck involved?

I trawl through the conspiracy websites, read the books, listen to the words over the airwaves. I hear ten million horrid things, all coalescing outside the field of vision, behind the curtain where Big Brother does his dirty, danky, and dangerous business. I watch and I wait for the coming of the end of days.

But yet I don't see the end anywhere near.

All I see is all I've ever seen. The world looks worse every day, in foresight, but even worse in rearsight. The world we inhabited a day, a month, a year, ten years ago was teetering on collapse, with real problems suppurating underfoot and the apocalypse just ahead, waiting to claim us all.

That's where it always is, after all.

I spent my childhood with Soviet missiles pointed at my hometown. Any day, with one mistake, one error, one Khrushchev Screwdriver too many, we could have been white noise in the skies. It could have ended then and there with raging heat and unbearable, smothering cold, and there were times when we went to bed wondering if we'd wake up the next day.

Oddly enough, we survived.

We survived even though the televangelists told us the Beast was coming. We survived even though the hippies told us the man was out to get us. We survived even though the spiky hairs told us there was no future. We survived even though the movies, tv, and fiction told us the future was going to be an irradiated, grim stew of Blade Runner skylines and Mad Max countrysides.

We survived it all, then, in spite of Big Brother's evil plan to eat us all up like chocolates.

So is now any different from then? We have Islamic terrorism instead of Communist domino theories, and guess what? Both are doomed to worm around themselves and fall over time. We have economic collapses and fake bubbles, but guess what? We've always had them, too, as far back as anything. We have unrest and worry and anger and fear.

But then, if we didn't, we wouldn't be human.

So I guess this means we're not doomed, after all. I guess this means we're just going to have to go back to our lives and live them, and our jobs and work them, and our responsibilities and live up to them. I guess this means we're going to have to resign ourselves to watching and making the news for the next however many years. I guess we're going to have to get President Obama to sound like Candidate Obama, again, and keep the left and right establishments on their toes.

I guess life is going to go on as normal, at least for another year.

So I plan to spend that year solving the problems I can do by myself, and helping others see ways to solve problems that need help from on high, or from the group. I plan to spend that year making certain elected officials hear my voice and heed it, even if they can't always agree with it. I plan to spend that year making some noise, in my own way, in my own time.

What are you going to do?

Make a good choice, my friends. The future is where we're going to spend the rest of our lives, and it's only as good as we can make it, together or alone.

Authors Website: http://rant-farm.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio:

J. Edward Tremlett is a lot of things, currently. He's back in the states after a seven-year stint in Dubai, UAE. He's been published in such diverse places as The American Partisan, the International American, The End is Nigh, Pyramid Magazine and Worlds of Cthulhu.

He's proudly in the thrall of the evil people who make bad things happen all around the world. He gets paid to shill for them on sites just like this, and is well-paid to do so. He also stole your car, ate your lunch, and had an amazing time with your lover while you were at work. But don't tell anyone. The machine is listening, always.

Please be aware that numerous things that are said are not to meant be taken seriously. Please be aware that serious things that are said are meant to be taken numerous ways. Please be seriously numerous with those things that are meant but not said, rather than said but not meant. Please be. : )