The sleepy little town of Mirth was an eventful place whose boom time had come and gone. They manage to stay busy, due to their fortuitous location on the lake. There is tourism, and plenty of cleanup to do from the years of mining and shipping. It’s a pretty special spot.
It’s the people though, it’s the people that make it. They like where they are. They figure it out. They want to be left alone. They are resolute to not dissipate. There is a lot of creativity, a couple of really good schools. And a fairly well established economy with the peripheral communities and towns.
There was a Town meeting. The discussion was about the Church bells. They rang every morning, as was the tradition in towns like these decades ago. While the propagated purpose of these bells are to denote the faithfulness of the people, the real reason was the employ of the industrialists who owned the town in those days. They were essentially an alarm clock, to wake the rabble peasants and roust them to their posts. This was the commodification of time… and people. Faithful, indeed.
The debate at the meeting was whether this tradition needed to continue. The local oligarchs had long since moved their operations along, into their next plunders. People were keeping their own schedules, anyway. These bells didn’t serve much purpose but to wake people keeping their own schedules, very inconveniently.
There were arguments made that as a time honored custom, it should continue, and that there was a charming, old-timey aspect to it that was worth hanging onto. The other side of the debate was that it was offensive. It was a conditioned behavior from days of severe exploitation, and that the people shouldn’t respect that sort of training by the self-proclaimed hierarchy.
It was determined, that the Sunday Church bells should be enough. That the daily ringing of the bells can stop. People would become accustomed to it. This way, perhaps in the future, some sort of system could be decided for the bells to serve another purpose during the week. In the case that an emergency meeting was necessary, maybe the bells could be rung for that. For civic events, or days that have historical significance. “Strictly for special uses.” was the wording in the resolution, and so it was. The people would be free from the remnant symbols of the feudal past.
It was the talk of the town for days. Chuck and Tim Potter were talking about it while they installed the new surveillance streetlights. The Principal and some teachers lauded the decision while they tested out the facial recognition software that would be used on the students… For their safety of course, because of how much the government cares about children, and how the people behind that technology are so trustworthy. The road workers were celebrating the decision as they installed the license plate readers at all the points of entry to the town. It was all in all big news, in the sleepy little town of Mirth.
512 Words
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