Let’s take a step back, for a moment, and consider all that’s at stake, all that’s in play. “You must calm down,” Murray says, “or you’ll get yourself killed.” Years earlier, we were all so caught up in the petty minutiae of our own lives that we couldn’t see the sinister forces at work in the background, lurking in the shadows as they’d always lurked. “I’d rather risk death than sit cooped up in this apartment waiting for something to happen,” Valeri says, “they have to pay for their murder.” I’ll be clear; there is no conspiracy and there’s never been a conspiracy. “They’ll pay,” Murray says, “but you’re no good to anyone if you’re bled out on the street.” Elaborate conspiracies are the domain of those with views limited by their own ignorance. “What happens to me is unimportant,” Valeri says, “so long as I can be of use to the cause.” No, these forces I speak of are as forces of nature, as the wind blows and as the tides rise and fall, so too do these forces of men act by vague compulsions and confused motivations, not as self-aware but as self-assured. “You’re a noble man,” says Murray, “and you should serve a higher purpose than sacrificing your life in a street battle.”
“You speak of the men in the streets as if they’re mere rabble,” Valeri says. “I know they’re not,” Murray says, “and neither are you.”
Days pass. Unusually, a rhythm returns to the streets, amid the heavy handed presence of the troopers and the martial law that’s been imposed. Working men like Valeri have been an afterthought in this city for some time, chewed up and then spit out when he’s no longer of use to those in power. For his whole life, he’s watched as his world has been transformed, as this city he’s called home for so long as he’s lived now seeks to expel him in a frantic, fevered campaign to eat themselves whole. It’s a disgusting sight, made all the more wretched by the thick stench of a foul winter’s night and the noxious smoke emanating from still-spewing stacks across the river. He leaves his simple, working class apartment, and although he knows it’s an absurd thought he can’t help but entertain the notion that he’ll come home after his shift to find his simple, working class apartment gone, the whole building demolished and replaced by elegance and luxury reserved for those of a higher pedigree than him. He sees in this time the memory of his parents and their failed rising, and chafes for his chance to avenge them anew.
The noxious smell of industrial smoke still lingers in the air, mixed with the foul stench of cigarette smoke. A younger co-worker of Valeri’s, Kyle Bridges, was among those killed in the street. He was a passionate young man, young enough not to know a passion ruined by the creeping cynicism that occurs in all men on the cusp of middle age. It’s a deeply personal crisis, one that strikes a chord with a thousand and one people all at once, but each in a different way. In a deeply personal crisis, one can’t help but isolate one’s self from all those around. It’s a futile effort. In those months, those years before that fateful day when people died in the streets, well, so many had already died in those very streets, so many die every day, some falling prey to a sexual predator, some choking on their own vomit in the midst of an overdose, still some in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides death, the common thread that runs through their lives is privation; none have enough to be deemed worthy of life. In these, the working man will, in time, find an ally natural and indispensible.
A mounting frenzy sets in as each of them frantically works to wring every last pound from the world. Another of Valeri’s co-workers, a still-younger man named Stuart James, is soon forced out of his home, among the first in a new round of evictions aimed at clearing out the under-class. The wealthy man is compulsively exchanging the real for the imagined, trading land for money, when the bottom falls out the people who acquired the imagined finding themselves still living in luxury while the people who’d acquired the real finding themselves losing everything. There’s a great amount of shouting and screaming but in the meanwhile nothing seems to change; the few continue to grow fat and lazy from the suffering of the many. But it’s not true that nothing changes. That’s just what they want you to believe. As they grow complacent, we grow learned in the art of war, each working man pushed out of his home, every working man made to lose his livelihood gaining us a knowledge we’ll soon put to good use.
But progress looms. A woman named Lillian Wolfe, widowed on the day of the massacre, cries softly as she prays in church, she one of many to take refuge in a house of God in times like these. Though it may not be immediately obvious in the aftermath of this latest breakdown in the current order, we’ve reached an epiphany, a transformative moment marking the start of a transition from one era to the next, each step brought down on the ground in front of us, each breath drawn in and pushed out moving us inexorably closer to that historical inevitability waiting for us on the other side of the horizon, just out of view. Even as it dawns on us, though, that the future is ours, we must never regard it as predestined, predetermined, for each day that passes brings us a day closer to our victory only so long as we use each day to work tirelessly and relentlessly towards that goal. In the meanwhile, as we ease ourselves out of this latest crisis, it’s instructive to look on these early, tentative days as an awkward step, one of many on our long and difficult path through to the future.
In the years before massacre in the city’s centre provokes the rise of a revolution, an urgency begins to settle in the streets, nerves rattled and passions become roused. A third young person, a man named Dominic Hayes, is one of the many to lose their livelihoods in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Now, like so many of his brothers and sisters Dominic In the working class tenements that’ve begun to vanish, demolished as the wealthy class sell them in a confusing array of transactions all aimed at increasing their profits, the working man has come to realize he’s been deceived for too long. These companies, impersonal, agreed-upon can hide behind a confusing network of deals only for so long; sooner or later, they all blur into a bureaucratic morass that can no longer confuse or conceal. An apartment block disappears, then another, then another, the very people who work to demolish the old and put up the new the same as those who would find themselves evicted from their own homes.
In the immediate aftermath of that massacre in the city’s streets, a series of rolling strikes cripple the means of production, leaving towers half-finished, leaving them empty concrete shells with jagged beams sticking out like broken bones. Columns of smoke rise from fires burning out of control, along the streets coursing a white hot rage so bright it seems to light up the night’s sky. This vision, this image of our shared future, I ask that you look upon that very moment and see if you can remain forever damned by a past you never wanted, by a future you’ve never deserved. Still this is all disorganized, the whole lot of them acting without thought, without objective, as history has chosen this moment to assert itself, not yet fully formed but in its embryonic stage still showing the early signs of its coming maturity.