I pull my gaze away from the ill-fated crater where my mailbox once stood, look over to my wife and say out loud, "What now"?
With a look of surprise, she turns to me and says, "That is my question, I thought you had a plan".
"Nope", I say," running off half cocked got me killed. Let's think about this. We are outgunned by the world's most powerful military, the local government is controlled by a priest who hates us, we need to find allies, and we are ghosts. Did I mention Brad Pitt or Clint Eastwood are not playing my part in this show"? "There is one perk to being a ghost, I lost my paunch, dropped ten years and my leg wound is gone"!
As I ponder what to do, I have to shake my head and wonder, how did we get this way? What went so terribly wrong that our own government turned on us. Who is us? As time went by us became a more and more exclusive group. Some I guess would say our democracy failed. I believe we failed our democracy. We stopped voting. We got cynical. We got turned off, things were too good and we no longer appreciated how we got these things. Sure, there were protesters, but over time protesters were seen as undesirables, people who didn't love our country. There were dissenting voices, but when they were fired from their jobs, we turned our heads.
We were looking for a fiction. We wanted an America that never existed. A nation without hunger, crime, corruption. We wanted a place where everybody smiled and shook your hand and called you sir. We wanted everyone to look like us, speak like us and believe like us. What did we believe?
We lost our way. We stopped wanting good for all, stopped saying WE THE PEOPLE and started saying THEY should stop trying to make waves. THEY should be like ME! We blamed our neighbor, blamed foreigners, blamed our gods, and turned our hate on ourselves like the Midgard serpent devouring our own tail. We believed if we could just get rid of the people who were not like us, everything would be okay again.
I see a fleeting figure darting back and forth in my neighbor's yard...or what is left of my neighbor's yard. The fence is gone, in fact only the foundation of the house remains. Its Action Man! I have nicknames for all my neighbors. Action Man is really Ricardo. He moved here from Miami. I gave him that nickname because the guy never stops working in his yard. It could be 2am and he's out in the yard with a flashlight raking leaves. I start to call out to him, then I notice something odd even for him. Action Man loads up a sack of leaves in his wheel barrel, dumps them, and an instant later he is back in the same spot raking up the same pile of leaves.
Action Man is a ghost. Even worse, Action Man is cycling. Cycling is what I was going through myself until I finally broke the pattern. Not really sparked by intelligence, the spirit is simply replaying the same scene, over and over, unable to notice the passage of time, unable to shake free from some repetitive behavior. Suddenly, I have an idea. We need allies. Action Man is one of the most industrious guys I know.
"Riii-caaar-dooooooo", I call out. "Come to me in the now. Hear the voice of my Muse. What have they done to you? You know what you must do. Are you lazy? You are needed now, look at me and reclaim your freedom".
Looking over at my wife I say, "I can't really believe that worked". She says, "You didn't have to be so cheesy about it". I respond curtly, "Yes I did"!
Action Man is standing in front of us, looking slightly disoriented. "What the hell happened to you?", I ask.