Experiment #635: "Writer's Alphabet: G is for Grace"
Technician: clank-o-tron
Grace (as selected by Robyn Reid)
Where are you right now? Do you have line-of-sight to a window? Don't turn around to check, just keep doing what you're doing. Better yet, think about what you're doing. What you're doing now. Right now. Really think about it. Think about what you did yesterday. Last week. Last year. Think of the most notable accomplishment in your lifetime, what you're most proud of. Now, if a 5.56mm round entered your head via that window over there, would you be satisfied with your life up until now? With your accomplishments, your gifts to the world? Or would us lot be better off without you? Think about it. Take your time.
It's trick question, of course - your opinon don't really matter. Mine don't either. Both of us are only alive because someone, somewhere doesn't mind that we keep breathing. But you're a good person, right? Respect your mum? Pay your phone bills mostly on time? Only steal the occasional bit of kit from the office? Probably never even seen a war crime done, let alone get pinched for one, right? Bad news, mate - none of that matters for spit because the criteria you're being judged on, you don't even know. There's invisible hands out there, gently guiding the world and you just gotta hope you don't end up as dirt under the nails.
That's the fairy story we tell people, anyway - a spot of fear is the best lubricant for the gears of civilization. Truth is, those invisible hands do what they can to stay clean, because failure to do so usually means complications later on - and, let's face it, if you ran a semi-legal, government-spanning paramilitary organization, wouldn't you want to keep things uncomplicated? Take last week, for example: one of the high-ranking mucky-mucks got mugged in a grocer's parking lot. Mugged, d'you believe it? This bloke decides the fate of nations and some chav with a knife sticks him up. Now, this guy could've rung up his cigar-smoking buddies and - in less than five hours - had his mugger's mum crying over the pile of organs what used to be her son. But he didn't. He didn't 'cause he recognized the mugger. See, there's a big narcotics bust going down next month, one that's been years in the making - gonna take down some mighty big fellows in the London drug trade. This mugger was one of the lower-tier pushers who was keen to tattle on his bosses in order to make sure all his charges went away. If the victim here - a man with fingers in every political pie from here to Jakarta - had taken the vindictive route, well, then that drug bust wouldn't go down too well, would it? That means a frustrated police force. That means grumpy kingpins. Anemic inquisitions from local politicians looking to increase their standing - not to mention the drugs staying in the system and continuing to polarize the socio-economic strata; etcetera, etcetera. That mugger is completely oblivious to the staggering benevolence he's been shown.
That's what it takes to keep everything moving along smoothly. It's what makes us different from those wretched second-world countries with their flighty dictators. We know when to swallow our pride and do what's proper in the long run. Everything that civilization is and ever will be, it owes to the first caveman who bested a rival but decided not to murder him; that first act of grace was the seed of proper civilization. They saw beyond their noses. Beyond the petty squabbling over some bird - it's always about a bird - and saw what would later be important instead of simply what's important now. They knew there were bigger blokes out there and that the smart thing to do was to buddy up. Of course, the idea caught on and that basically led to the first arms race, which - omitting a few minor details - brings us to today.
Sadly, the nature of civilization steers it to eventual, catastrophic failure. A small, successful society will be strong and that strength will allow it to grow. Sooner or later, though, it'll get too big for itself. The leadership will have to delegate tasks to lesser authorities, losing the ability to be directly accountable for the actions. If that doesn't ruin things, it will increase in size some more, meaning that another layer delegation will spring up. Bloody middle management... how is it that culpability decreases as the number of managers inreases? Point being: as soon as a society reaches the size where everyone in no longer able to know - really know - everyone else, it becomes a different beast. It can't be governed in the same way as before, where everyone trusts and respects each other because - guess what? The second a bastard thinks nobody's looking, he's going to show his true colors. And when another bastard sees a bastard bein' a bastard and getting away with it? Oh, you better believe he's going to push his luck as well. Like bloody pigeons - one gets a crumb, another gets closer to get crumbs first, then another... if you leave 'em alone, they'll have your wallet and hat - be up to the grocers half an hour later using your credit card to buy stale loaves of bloody pumpernickel.
So, step one: get rid of the bastards, yeah? Well, sunshine, it ain't that easy; you can't just ask 'em to raise their hands so you can shove them into the ocean. Nice, polite people want to ignore horrible things and that's what people who do horrible things rely on. To combat the malaise generated by - what I and me colleagues like to call 'excessive bastard saturation' - there needs to be a group of nice, polite people who aren't afraid to do horrible things to horrible people. That's where we come in. Now, the benefit to the greater good is rarely questioned when one of those horrible people is shuffled off this mortal coil. What's more complicated is when one of the nice, polite people gets between us and one of those horrible people. They truly have no idea what's going on, no idea what their part is and what we've been trying to do for months; no idea how hard we've worked to avoid having to put them down. It comes down to the simple fact that sometimes, someone has to die and they never even know why. Their guardian angel was off having tea, leaving them to unwittingly trod on the toes of a god. It's a damn shame, it is. Still, omelettes gotta be made and I ain't crying for no eggs.
Now, go look out the window and give us a smile, yeah?