Short Story: Huh?!

Short Story: Huh?!

This piece has not been edited by the ShortbreadStories team

EVERY MAN GOT A RIGHT TO DECIDE HIS

OWN DESTINY,

AND IN THIS JUDGMENT THERE`S

NO PARTIALITY….

These are the wise words of someone who was always stoned half out of his head and word is he died of cancer (from being hooked on chronic shit/ganja/spliff or whatever alias one fancies.)

Those words, among others, could be considered as having played a fundamental role in the colonized of the world achieving independence (a euphemism for In dependence—as in depending on others for your survival) and establishing the rule of democracy. We shall not talk about World Bank and IMF policy here as we could find ourselves in a No-Fly Zone and risk being knocked off our asses by F16s and Stealth Bombers.

We recently had an election and I realize the people who have more right to decide their own destiny were the illiterates and semi-literates. Most middle and upper class folk just thumb their noses at the exercise. Then they relax in their $300.000 pads, sit back on their $20.000 sofas in their silk pajamas watching 6 foot plasma screens depicting the country going downhill faster than the Discovery and wonder what the heck is going on.

Without meaning to, I found myself re-reading The Dogs Of War at the start of the campaigns. By the time we reached the LCV elections, I was through and had picked up another book; Honor Among Thieves.

While going through the first one, my progress was always interspersed with media reports of skirmishes in various places as voters and their Foolers (candidates) positioned themselves for the utmost foolery and sadism we have seen in a while. We were exposed to Foolers` pasts that turned out to be interesting in some cases and also personal traits that one would normally only expect to hear about from their partners/spouses. And what`s with the police? I mean, someone gets on National TV, or any other for that matter, and starts rallying people to come out and loot our property and cease our lives, and they just sit around waiting to deploy! Let`s start our own Guantanamo; of course the Americans, God bless them, will be the first to condemn us but who gives a coitus …?

At the LCV stage, at least in the area where I was, Foolers were hard at it, rigging, bribing, threatening and beating up rival supporters …of course from a distance and mostly by proxy. When several people were nabbed with ballot papers and in some cases boxes, I started on the second book.

Then some Foolers got physical with it and started attacking Returning Officers, rival Polling Agents and the police. The police swung into action, trust them! Many are the pictures where they forced the Fooled, many above thirty who had never done a single exercise in their miserable life, to perform forward flips and cartwheels as they were forced onto double-cabin trucks. At this stage I picked up another book: Shall We Tell The President?

Immediately this farce ended Foolers were allover our judicial chambers, filing petitions for this and injunctions for that. Most of them got rebuked (legally) for their trouble and got cracking fast out of court. Back home, I glanced at a James Hadley Chase: The Way The Cookie Crumbles.

My first is reading: Cry Beloved Country; the wife If Tomorrow Never Comes and our last, apart from age, is classified among the illiterates. The difference here is that he is not taking to the streets; possibly simply because it would take him all day to crawl there!