‘What Then?’
If the government falls, what then? Will a new one take its place? Will a directive rise in its wake? Perhaps a tribunal will step in to take charge of the situation, or a bunch of thugs will battle over its jurisdiction. Perhaps all of the above will take place, one after the other. And we will all suffer …
And if the civil service doesn’t apply basic public relations and customer service to its operations, there will be throngs of dissatisfied citizens swarming the administration, unable to get things done …
And if we don’t eat our vegetables, we won’t become president, and we won’t do well at school, and we will fail our medical exams, and we won’t be part of the new dynamic that expects people to eat their soybeans to be healthy humans …
And if we don’t pay attention to what our parents tell us, and don’t do what the elders advise us, and disregard the writing on the towering wall, we’re going to lose out on a bank of knowledge that’s been accumulating for years, and we will end up doing exactly what the old ones did when they were young and restless and ‘all-knowing’ …
And if we don’t stop drinking and driving, we will continue to see people getting killed on the streets over a couple more pints and a few meaningless cheers. We will shake our heads, and hurt, and suffer endlessly, and cry for the dead, and fight over rules and regulations, and mourn, and mourn, and fear our very shadow. We will do all this if the government falls and the public service fails to step up to the plate and we don’t eat our vegetables and don’t pay attention to our parents or elders or the writing on the wall, and to the laws that forbid drinking and driving. We will be in deep trouble, from which we will have a very hard time extricating ourselves …
But if the sky burns up, and the sun disappears for centuries?
What then? Whatever will we do then?