When Everything Changed (3 page)

With the world rapidly transforming into a kind of utopia that few
people ever thought would be possible, there’s still a sad undercurrent running
through the invisible lines that connect us all. We’re not morose exactly, but
every once in a while, you feel it briefly, or you see it on someone’s face
when they’re deep in thought. No one really talks about it though. Despite the
advanced aliens who are the smartest people on the planet telling us that we
should be proud of ourselves, we’re still not entirely happy.

There’s not really any problems left to be fixed that aren’t
already well underway – not even in ourselves. But it’s our past that we can’t
escape. Now that we are living examples of how wonderful life is and always
could have been, we can’t understand how and why we were so messed up before.
It didn’t even require the superior intelligence of the Guardians to implement
all of the solutions that they did. As they pointed out, a child could have
thought of them. But a child didn’t nor did an adult. Not anyone we ever
listened to anyway.

And that’s what I think makes us sad at times. We could have
changed our world at any time with no more intelligence than we already had.
But we didn’t. We had to be ordered to do all of the things that needed to be
done. We were like a bunch of drug-addicts in need of intervention. Like
mentally-ill people who hadn’t been taking our meds. We became so universally
insane, that insanity became the new normal.

It didn’t have to be that way, and no matter how much we claim
that we did the best we could, we all know we could have done better. A
lot
better. All along, we were capable of turning our beautiful planet into an
incredible place to live, and loving ourselves and our families and our
neighbors and taking our minds to new heights that could’ve gone far beyond the
mundane levels we were fixated on.

But we were always focused on our personal desires. We wanted to
have whatever we wanted, and we wanted it now. So we all ran around in mindless,
meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the
grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything
around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone
else to tell us to stop it.

For the most part, people are happy with the way everything is
changed; they’re just not happy about how it was done. I’ve heard that an
underground resistance is forming to take back our freedom. I don’t think it’s
at all possible to fight the Guardians, and I’m fairly sure that any effort to
do so is doomed to failure. But I understand the reasoning for a rebel
movement.

No one objects now to the way things are. We just want to prove
that we can continue doing well on our own, without supervision. We need to
prove to them and to ourselves that we’re a better people now. That’s something
that might even be worth fighting for, even if we don’t have a chance of
winning.

###

About
the author

Edward M
Wolfe is the author of “Ataraxia: Georgio Goes to Space,“ “
Devon’s Last
Chance,
” the post-apocalypse series “
In The End” and the non-fiction
examination of the real cause of school shootings: “Fun & Games & Mass
Murder.”
For more, visit his Amazon author page:
http://amazon.com/author/edwolfe
. “
When Everything Changed – The Novel
”
will be published in 2014 on Kindle and in paperback. News, free short stories,
and essays are available at
http://EdwardMWolfe.com