But so too does the rebel know the importance of applying a constant, steady pressure from all corners, reaching into the night to draw from within its darkness a mass action, mobilizing the students and the clergymen and the trade unionists into a single mass of humanity against they who would seek to preserve the way of things. The rebel’s goal is to make the current order untenable, the current state ungovernable. And so the rebel waits, continuing to gather his strength, adding to his forces, stockpiling his armaments, disseminating his seditious knowledge to those who would seek to conspire with him against the way of things, through a convoluted network of agents and actors, of sympathizers and supporters, eventually finding its way into the receptive mind of the working man. Over time, this receptiveness will turn into sympathy, some time later into wholehearted embrace. Deftly, the rebel dances a delicate dance, astride the markers of history in the making, with only a force powerful enough to lay waste to the streets needed to make way for the future.
As the working man seeks shelter from the chaos in his own quarters, he thatches together the means to survive this crisis spiralling rapidly towards war. Many of his are arrested, but few have yet died, the chaos gripping the city, the country, the entire world seeing the storm troopers here in his hometown stretched too far and too wide to bother much with him. With the stores looted of food, supplies, things like soap and bread have disappeared in the time it’s taken the first bodies to hit the ground. So too are his cupboards bare, and he survives through this early time not by his wits but by the pooling of what little he has with his brothers and sisters among the worker, the student, and the parishioner, their meagre resources enough to provide sustenance in the meanwhile. Still the crowds vacate the streets, looking to the skies for guidance, seeking the patience that can only come from the almost-spiritual release in surrender to the forces moving around him like the fast-moving waters of a river around the rock stuck stubbornly in the middle. But not all is lost. Life, what’s left of it, goes on, and in so going adapts to the changing circumstances all find themselves immersed in, the working man like all the others finding a way to survive through this early period when no one seems concerned for his immediate welfare but him. A sudden explosion erupts from within a school in the wealthy man’s part of town, once the dust settles the death toll standing at almost two hundred adolescents and their teachers. The rebel avoids the limelight, his apparatchiks making a point to avoid taking responsibility for this attack.
Hearing a sudden bang snap across the darkness followed by the sound of concrete crumbling, he knows this is another attack by the rebel, and for a moment he entertains the notion that this time the rebel might’ve deigned to take decisive action. In the midst of a confusing, chaotic time, thunderous explosions go off here and there, randomly interrupting daily life as women and children search for cover, life interrupted as the streets in the time it’s taken those first drops of blood to hit the pavement. At the end of one shift but before the start of another, power cuts in and out randomly, sometimes out for days, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for just long enough to fit the dark in the blink of an eye. Anger spills into the streets even as those very streets remain deserted, like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with scraps of paper fluttering across the pavement in the summer’s light wind. But when the working man stands for only a moment a stream of letters scrolling across his screen, messages overpowering his screen’s settings to display the requisite stories from the talking heads, denouncing lawlessness, preaching devotion to law and order, infusing every breath, every word with a forced anger and a strained intimidation. The working man may not know this in the way you and I do, but on some instinctive level he realizes the wealthy man is improvising things too. All the world’s burning with the fires of liberation still yet in their infant state, with only the slightest wind needed to catch them and send them rising into the highest, the towering inferno. But the old order remains. It’s all a fraud. Every actor has a role to play; each must play their role to its inevitable end. This is why, the working man knows, this early period where there’s disorder in the streets and sporadic battles erupting all over town and across the country the way of things is still strong, still firmly entrenched, these first acts, these protests and these gun battles and these bombings only like the first and lightest of raindrops to build, slowly, into a typhoon-like storm. Little does the working man know that the storm troopers are already plotting their next move, scraping together a force to venture into enemy territory in the hopes of taking to the offensive, after events have so rapidly turned against them. They lash out not because they believe it will work, though they may very well believe it will work, but because they must. It’s their role to play.
But enough, for now, of the rebel; his is a cause long in the making, and long yet still to be made. As the rebel plots and as the working man struggles through these dangerous times, the wealthy man considers his options, deploying his considerable holdings from their safe havens to furnish the storm troopers with new weapons, new shields, believing as he does that such things will save him. But the surge had crested at exactly the moment those angry young men had been shot and killed in the street before, in a crack of thunder and smoke, coming down in a crash. Many projects stall. Many new buildings fall dark and silent, with crews leaving their tools in place after the sudden end of their last shift. Cranes stand over the empty, half-finished concrete shells, cables left to dangle in the wind. It’s all so surreal. After we’ve come this far, I lead you down an empty street and point out the sights here and there, the cracks in the pavement and the weeds sprouting from between them, the faded paint and the still-smoldering fires of liberation having long since burned out. The laughter of children who have never lived here rings out, echoing off the hardened concrete, lending the streets an eerie, ghostly atmosphere made all the more eerie and ghostly by the smog and the dust of a late-summer’s heat wave surging over the city, inflaming tensions, enflaming passions, all at once the wreckage of the old crumbling in an impossible yet familiar falling-apart of all that we’ve come to know. Still, the wealthy man hoards his wealth, casting the working man and all the working man’s friends and allies into the streets. And the rebel does not intervene to defend the working man in this, his time of need.
It’s only been some weeks since dozens of innocents were cut down in a hail of rifle fire right in these very streets, and already we’ve reached the point where the wealthy man has come to feel so pressured, but not yet threatened that his will compels the storm troopers to strike. As the young men and women who form the detritus of society linger in the shadows, in open doorways and behind broken windows, a confused tension sets into the air like the burning of muscles after too long an exercise. Factories shutter, then reopen as if they’d never shuttered at all. A construction crane topples, the next day seeing a brand new crane in exactly the same place. It’s all so confusing and disorienting, how this can be happening, how the wealthy man can preserve his place in the way of things even as this wave of violence sweeps over the city and across the country, already extending, in spots here and there, around the world. At night, one night, the working man is called into work, only for the one night, sent home clutching tight in his pocket a pittance smaller than ever before. Still yet the working man looks ahead, watching the fires of liberation burn long into the night, their bright, red-and-gold flames licking into the bluish-black skies, their colour blending to turn the night a sickly, obscene, offensive shade of crimson, as though confused, disoriented as the working man. But it’s a fraud. As the skies have no thought, no will, neither does the working man, his thoughts, his feelings at the whim of they who would deem themselves his masters, whether they be on his side or not. In this, his moment of indecision, the working man is vulnerable, and in his vulnerability he is in exactly the right frame of mind to become receptive to the ideas that would be forbidden to the working man in the wealthy man’s world.