A FUTURE VISION: How to Avoid Armageddon

	Our apathy today
	is kindling for the coming flame;
	as arms merchants discern with deadly delight,
	Armageddon is already staking its claim.

	Billions of blind souls bask in blissful fog,
	unaware of the infernos drawing near:
	how many cities must char and smolder
	before the sleepwalking masses finally hear?

	Doing nothing is the easiest path
	to glide toward a holocaust-by-default,
	offering a glowing, churning, tritium stew
	where half-lives churn in rue.

	Once the radioactive curtains rise
	and the screaming millions find no door,
	all scripts will snap with cold rigidity
	as entropy settles all scores.

	If you hunger for a different end,
	then cut the hollow lines handed to you;
	refuse all dramas that warmongers vend
	and smash their clockwork and devious designs.

	For every face inside each frightened throng
	still grips a pen with trembling, stubborn hand—
	the right to write the final song
	is ours to claim, to save, squander, or strand.


   Sam sank so deeply into his velvet-shredded chair that the chair seemed to be slowly consuming
him. He tracked sugar granules across the coffee table with one finger in lethargic, purposeless
arcs. The low-frequency thrum of the city's atmospheric scrubbers pressed against him like a
second skin. Sam hadn't taken anything: no chemicals, no stimulants. Just too much meditation
and not nearly enough human contact. The result felt roughly the same.

   "I'm a cosmic hiccup," he said, his voice barely clearing the ambient noise. "A blip on a dying
screen. I don't feel like I'm co-authoring anything, Tim. I feel like I'm watching the final
credits roll over a landscape of rubble."

   Tim studied him the way someone examines a cracked mirror—not unkindly, just cataloguing which
distortions were structural. The blue light from his neural-link pulsed faintly at his temple, a
slow metronome. "So you feel sidelined," Tim said. "Like a digital serf. Trapped inside a
machine humming with billions of other disposable lives, all of them efficiently convinced they
were replaceable before they were even born."

   Sam snorted softly, half amused, half exhausted. He nodded toward the flickering news-feed on
the wall, where the grim, pixelated faces of some 21st century world leaders— Trump, Putin,
Netanyahu, Kim Jong-un—loomed like ancient, predatory gods. Their faces were worn smooth by
overexposure until they looked less like men and more like weather patterns.

   "Exactly. And knowing the shape of the cage doesn't dissolve the bars. These people have the
silos, the drones, the disinformation engines that can sandblast history clean in nanoseconds
and repaint it before lunch. They feel unstoppable. I feel small and invisible."

   Tim's chair groaned as he leaned back—a deep, structural protest, like a decommissioned
spacecraft flexing in a powerful solar storm. He let the silence breathe for a moment before he
spoke, his voice dropping into something close to conspiratorial. "They are only unstoppable if
you operate according to their clockwork. Step outside the machinery, Sam. Every system you
believe is crushing you from the outside has its source code running right here"—he tapped his
own temple, beside the flickering implant—"inside the skull. Rewrite the code, and the machine
loses its jurisdiction over your fear."

   Sam shook his head slowly, the gesture of a man deflecting a hope he no longer trusted himself
to hold. "I tried the 'inner peace' route, Tim. Sat in the dark. Breathed deeply. Looked for the
light." He paused. "Found my own pain, just with better lighting." He exhaled—a long,
pressurized breath, as if releasing something that had been sealed in for years. "Suffering
isn't a glitch in the hardware. It's a feature. It's baked into our hardware." His eyes drifted
toward the bar end of the coffee shop, where the rhythmic clink of glasses offered a philosophy
considerably simpler than anything they'd been circling. He pushed himself upright, joints
registering a formal complaint. Blunter and more honest. "What do you say we find some suffering
we can actually swallow?  Beer. Or something older and darkera?" He glanced back at Tim with the
ghost of a grin.  "Your call. End of the world drinks—on me."

=================================================================================
from _AmeriSong: Poetry, Art, & Dialogs about Amerika_ by T Newfields
SUMMARY:  Thoughts about collective apathy and agency, with the possibility that collective courage can rewrite fate.
KEYWORDS: nuclear duality (tritium-plutonium), holocaust-by-default, cosmic barbecue (metaphor),
systemic disentanglement, source code of the mind, geopolitical architects, co-authorship of reality,
digital serfdom, fatalistic rhetoric, disinformation apparatus, war scripts,
Armageddon, social apathy, nuclear dystopia, digital servitude, rewriting fate
Author: T Newfields [Nitta Hirou / Huáng Yuèwǔ] (b. 1955)
Begun: 2002 in Nagoya, Japan / Finished: 2026 in Shizuoka, Japan
Creative Commons License: Attribution. {{CC-BY-4.0}} Granted

Disclosure: This piece was partially generated using AI tools for styling and ideation; 
            human editing was then applied.

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