Pilliars in the Fall by Ian Daniels Read Free Book Online

my voice though because she pressed me again.
    “Well, you have to have an opinion.”
    “Oh I have plenty of those, I just don’t know about the big picture stuff, don’t much pay attention to it anymore,” I laughed and answered her a little more clearly.
    “ You missing the details or not paying attention to something, I doubt it,” Blake laughed. He knew how much I valued being informed if nothing else.
    “No really,” I smiled, he knew me too well. “I stopped paying attention to the big political stuff a while ago and feel better for it. No need to worry about something when it really doesn’t affect you one way or the other,” I finished, or thought I had finished, but Danielle looked disapprovingly at me.
    “Don’t you care what’s going on in the country or the world?”
    “No, not really,” I answered without giving it much thought. It wasn’t completely accurate, but at this point I thought I’d just play this angle and see where the conversation went.
    “How can you not care?” she asked skeptically.
    “Because we have plenty to worry about righ t here. The country is crashing; heck, it has been for a while. It might all unravel or this might just lead to the restart that some people think is needed. None of that puts wood in the fireplace or food on our plates though.”
    She didn’t have an answer ready for that so I trudged on.
    “The lady yelling at Jack today is a perfect example. I know everything I need to about the way most people think and what that will them into when times get tough. Whether the country Balkanizes or not, it doesn’t change the general ignorance about what the US was and how far we’ve declined.”
    “You think the country could really break up? You think it will get that bad?” Kathy sounded more than a little afraid of the idea.
    “I can’t tell the future beyond what we’ll have to eat for the next meal,” I tried to lighten the mood a little for her sake.
    “But you still have hope,” Kathy stated wishfully.
    “And compassion,” Danielle finished for her. “Or else you wouldn’t have tried to help that guy at the train station.”
    “That was just bad judgment,” I deadpanned. “Honestly that lady that was yelling at Jack had a point. There is a reason we are where we are."
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’ve gone downhill as a whole. There isn’t going to be an EMP to kill all the power, the stock markets haven’t closed, they just crashed and are bouncing along the bottom. We didn’t get invaded by a foreign superpower; we got invaded by idiots from our own country.”
    “Well okay, but those are still national problems that are affecting us in our day to day lives,” Danielle said, thinking she had somehow scored a point.
    “Kind of yes, kind of no. The thing is there isn’t going to be one event like Pearl Harbor to unite the nation and at some point, if there is another Pearl or Nine Eleven, we will be too far gone from who we were when those things happened to cowboy up and fight the enemy.”
    No one said anything, so I continued on.
    “Like I said, we are in a steady decline headed towards third world nation status... and that's in the good areas. In other places, it won’t just be third world standards, it will be no standards. It’s the new and more vicious Wild West. We’re looking at a new standard of living everywhere. There will be a new definition of normal, and out here, just being able to put food on the table and not freezing to death may be the new day in, day out job for everybody."
    “So where does it all level out?” Clint spoke up for the first time, asking the intelligent and leading question that I could expect only him to come up with.
    “Like I said, I don’t know. I think the best anyone can do is try to avoid slipping back into the eighteen hundreds where the majority of your family that hasn’t died from disease or starvation doesn’t then get killed off in a land or cattle feud.”
    “Oh that