The way I see it, Dystopia is nothing but a distraction from a reality that will be even worst. In Dystopia, faceless stormtroopers tower over the horrified masses as they cling together for warmth. The guardsmen grit their teeth and pull their triggers on throngs of desperate protesters, cutting down waves of innocence with sinister certainty.

But in reality?

In reality, reality is nothing like that. In reality, the police don’t need to be scary to scare you. In reality, the courts are so clogged and the cops are so callous and the cages are so cramped that the thought of getting lost in the labyrinth of their logistics scares you more than a bullet to the back of the head ever could.

In reality, nobody needs to shoot you at all. You get knocked on you a** by a zillion-dollar sound cannon and run away to save the eardrums you don’t have the savings or the health insurance to lose.

In Dystopia, tattered rags or drab uniforms are dutifully worn by all; met eyes and encoded gestures are made in shadows as the steel doors crush together. Ragtag rebels rediscover the unity of long-lost ethnic identities, and in each other they find hope, strength. And if their failure is assured, in Dystopia, they gain the one thing their tormentors can never possess:

Love.

But in reality, the only people who even notice you are strangers trying to look down your skirt. In reality, your best friend is a cellphone – a good one, if you’re lucky. In reality, you never cared about other people until the other people were other people like you – and you’d put them up the river if they crashed on your couch for longer than a weekend.

And who can you blame? In Dystopia, it’s easy. In Dystopia, the evil and cruel are always up the hill, down the dungeon, through the woods. They want your blood. They want your babies. They want your brainwaves, or the shells of your bodies – the heat of your sexy, starving orifices.

But reality is never that interesting. In reality, even the most horrible and seemingly incomprehensible power always ends up being the same old song: A bunch of a**holes trying to get rich. In reality, the people frantically obsessed with money are never those people at all – in reality, the people whose whole lives revolve around money are the people who have no choice.

Because they don’t have any.

And in reality, the wealthy no longer need a thing from anyone else at all – not to die in some war, not to live in some place, and not to build something that a robot has built in the time it took you to read this sentence.

And in Dystopia, all of our creation churn midnight oil into a hateful sun. Disease boil through skin; faces are rendered tragically unf**kable. The destruction of mother earth turns everyone into a chimney sweep, a hooded nightmare, an asphyxiating tinker.

But in reality, the sky is blue as ever. The air is fever crisp, and the bright stars within it are what you look up at which you wait for an ambulance after being stabbed over an apple that now cost twenty dollars.

In Dystopia, your only possession is a torn photograph. You end up bartending at a neon-soaked nightclub for futuristic gangsters.

But in reality? In reality, you could never get that job. And if you were forced to become an outlaw yourself, you’d probably end up being the victim of a far worse crime than you could ever bring yourself to commit.

In Dystopia, you finally matter. You’re finally going to make a difference. Every oppression ignites you with anger and fury that spurs you into legendary action.

But in reality, you are exhausted.

Forever, forever exhausted.

You think Dystopia is some big story.

It’s not.

It’s just a shi**y little epilogue that goes on forever.

And it all ends up in nothing.

---trainride end---