Parallel Lives

 

The stranger awakened with a start.  He remembered lying down to take a nap under an oak tree.  This time, he looked up at the giant sycamore that his head was resting upon. 

Leaving the small forest of trees just outside of a neighborhood which he had first assumed was his own, the stranger immediately noticed that the energy level was much different.  It was Summertime and families were out in their yards with children riding bikes and playing ball.

No one was wearing masks nor was there any social distancing going on.  The stranger approached a woman who was watching her child riding her bike. 

“Doesn’t anyone know that we are in a pandemic?” the stressed-out stranger asked the woman.

“There’s no pandemic here,” the woman replied. 

“Aren’t we under lockdown by our government and healthcare officials to mitigate the spread of the COVID virus?”

“Of course not, that’s preposterous!” said the woman calling in her child as she had begun to distrust the stranger’s sanity.

The stranger continued walking down the sidewalk.  He came across a man sitting in his yard watching children playing on a waterslide. 

“Do you want a beer?” asked the man.  There was an empty lawn chair next to him with an ice chest in-between. “The wife’s inside checking on her casserole.” 

“Aren’t we supposed to be in lockdown for the virus due to government mandates?” asked the stranger.

The man laughed.  “Why would we allow such madness?  Granted, we had a bad flu season the year-before-last.  But last year’s flu season was mild.  Most had built up a natural immunity to it by then.”

“But didn’t the government mandate vaccinations for the people?” 

“Come to think of it, some little sawed-off, snake-oil salesman tried to scare us into taking his toxic drugs awhile back, but after we hanged him for treason, support for such nonsense disappeared.  I don’t even remember his name.” 

“Nobody that I know of has ever taken any of these shots,” the man continued.  “When we threatened to mandate them for all politicians and their families under direct medical and scientific supervision, the entire agenda pretty much petered out.”

The stranger was having trouble processing what he was hearing.  He changed the subject.

“What about the wars in the Middle East?” he asked.  “Are our troops still being pulled out of these areas?”

“That’s crazy talk!” the man answered, beginning to look at the stranger with a jaded eye. “Our troops were never even there.  After we exterminated the traitors involved in the Gulf of Tonkin hoax and made politicians guilty until proven innocent for any corruption charges by law, we haven’t been involved in any war since.”

“I don’t know where the hell you came from,” the man continued, “But we learned a long time ago that hanging a few traitors now and then results in much less misery and bloodshed for the rest of us.”

The Stranger looked around at the vibrant neighborhood where everyone was enjoying themselves.  It reminded him of his own childhood and what a different world it had been back then, where the streetlights told him when to come home and monsters masquerading as humans were found only in the movies.

The Stranger wanted to go back to a simpler way of life.  He understood that no people could evolve unless they were allowed access to both sides of the story.  Anyone or any system that would restrict this information was the enemy to true growth and a meaningful existence no matter their earthly guise.   

Upon returning to the forest, the Stranger climbed up the sycamore tree to rest.  He slept peacefully with a child-like faith that he would awaken to a better way of life.