It’s us or them
It’s us or them.
That’s the way I look at things these days.
When you got only so much to go around, you’ve got to keep what you have and stop anyone else from taking it.
Now this holds true even when the state gets it in its head to cut the welfare rolls some more.
We’re the ones that pay the price, not the politicians.
We get the poor and down-trodden lining up outside the village gate, begging us to let them in, or toss out anything they can eat or keep warm with.
Like we got enough to spare.
Everybody thinks that because that because we live in a neighborhood behind guarded walls that we’re rich.
Some of the walled neighborhoods are; some like ours just barely stay alive with the trades, we making a living by doing the work the real rich don’t want to do.
We don’t let anyone in these days, rich or poor.
And there are a few rich people left in the outlands, poor souls who thought they could hold off the hordes with personal walls and personal security.
John Donne once wrote about nobody being an island, and these fools prove it, rushing up to our gate offering us a fortune to let them in, too.
Some of us want to let the rich in, but most of us don’t, knowing that money and happiness don’t really mix, especially when you have some that are rich and others just making it.
Whole neighborhoods have gone up in smoke because the wrong people moved in, rich and poor.
Nobody really likes living in a cage like we do, and for a long time, we tried to avoid putting up walls the way most of the other neighborhoods did.
But we had to shoot so many people trying to get in at us in our village, we eventually gave up and constructed the wall, if only to reduce the dead we have to bury.
It is hard to tell which is worse, shooting people out right, or listening them moan outside, knowing that they’re dying slowly anyway.
Lately, I’ve felt down right mean, hearing people call me a monster for letting people die.
Maybe I am being inhuman. Maybe you lose a lot of humanity when it comes to staying alive.
When the state cuts back welfare, we have to tighten security more just to guard against the first few days when the real chaos hit, and masses of margin people from the unwalled sections of the city try to break in on us, after they have lynched whatever Republican unlucky enough to be outside his or her own neighborhood when the riots start.
We get a lot of shooting, folks on the outside taking pot shots at anyone moving along the top of the wall, and, of course, we got to shoot back just to keep their snipers out of range.
Usually, we don’t do much more than that, sitting back if we can until the worst blows over and those who are going to starve, starve, and the rest wander back to the holes out of which they’ve come to feed off rats, cats, and dogs when they can’t find decent food.
That’s when the state sends in the National Guard to clean up the bodies.
You don’t want an epidemic by leaving the bodies to rot.
After so many of these things, it gets to be routine.
Yet routine or not, it’s never comfortable, and we’re always getting somebody trying to break in, even during those times when the state leaves welfare alone.
Some desperate fools charge right at the walls and get shot down. The more clever ones might even get over the wall to a worse fate being trapped between the wall and the barbed wire fences where our dogs get at them. What the dogs don’t eat, we throw back over the wall.
Some people out there will eat anything, even some of their own.
Some of the cleverest actually managed to find their way inside, despite all our monitors and other precautions, and our neighborhood wardens have to hunt them down, wasting even more ammunition if they won’t leave quietly.
It’s the very few we don’t catch that scare me most.
Oh we get 99 percent of the poor. But some rich do get in despite all we do to keep them out, finding some weak soul in our tribe willing to take bribes to hide them. They are here among us, pretending to be one of us. We don’t always know who is who.
Some of them even manage to establish themselves in our society, creating false identities, raising their kids and sending them to our schools.
We offer rewards for information about them.
But those wealthy enough to pay their way in often are wealthy enough to keep hidden.
Some fools in our community even feel sorry for these terrorists, rich or poor, giving them shelter, even treating them as if they are equal to the rest of us.
We’ve set up rewards for those of us who betray the trust by harboring such illegal aliens. When we find them, we put the aliens and the traitors outside the wall. This is a death sentence, I know. But it is the only way to keep our neighborhoods safe and pure.
After all, it’s us or them.
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