REQUIEM

Then they came for the refugees, and they cried " they are killing us!"...No one listened, they were just boat people, we thought we could control our fear and the consequences of our actions and inaction by controlling our borders.

Then they came for the welfare recipients, and they cried " they are killing us!"...No one listened, they were no longer our mothers and uncles, we saw them as failed people, useless eaters, wasted lives and thieves.

Then they came for the journalists, and they cried " they are killing us!" " They are lying to you, they are programming you, playing you, making lies the new truth!"...No one listened, by then, we couldn't see past our own prejudices and into their manipulation. We had no idea what truth looked like or what to do with it even if we had.

Then they came for the farmers and manufacturers, and they cried " they are killing us!" " They are polluting and taking the land, killing our capacity to create jobs and undermining our productivity!"...No one listened, those hippy lefty scum. We wanted more, faster, cheaper, we didn't think to care what they cost us, others or the planet.

Then they came for the unions, and they cried " they are killing us!" "They are killing our penalties and awards, turning workers into slaves!"...No one listened, we thought we had outgrown the need for them, that we could survive by ourselves, singletons in a corporate governed world we had no rights in and no recourse to demand them.

Then they came for our liquid assets and our parents homes, and they cried " they are killing us!" "They are taking away the profits of our labor and damning our inheritances!"....No one listened. No one understood enough to think deeply about what the consequences were or could be and we were too busy to look up and see the faces or hear the voices of those that had faced them first.

Then they came for our law, they changed legislation into policies to avoid debate. They undermined our enshrined values, changed our definitions, added penalties for actions that had never been crimes before, altering our laws intention, and the effected cried " they are killing us"! " We are losing our identities, our civil and human rights, our right to tell the truth and hold government accountable!".....No one listened, they were all too busy watching Survivor.

Then they came for our systems, so many interwebbed corporations bidding for control and power like fleas. They privatised our essential services, our payment systems, our government portfolios and infrastructure, seized control of all the human beings that depended on them....No one cried, no one listened.

No one knew how to listen anymore. Half of us were too busy attacking the other half that we never looked up to see where the strings were let alone who was really pulling them.

No one could have predicted what came next. In our arrogance, our naivety, our simple and ignorant humanity, we lost it all and just kept loosing. We still are, only now there is no one left who has not cried, who does not listen.

No one left that does not intimately know that all the promises and all the old bets, are off.