Not with a bang nor a wimper

This story is not set in some far away time or place that could be, it is about the here and now. It comes about not because evil won a war, but instead because humanity failed to understand and listen. It is amazing to think that in a time where information was so vast, knowledge so deep, and facts so glaring that such a simple thing could be forgotten, and yet simplicity in its most basic necessity is so elegant and pure that it is often glanced over as mundane. It is almost amusing the think that the straw that finally broke humanity was not a physical strike, or even an environmental catastrophe as we had all been mongered into believing. Instead, it was the human psyche that broke beyond repair. We lost our belief in belief and our hope for a better tomorrow.

The deathblow struck first the downtrodden and meek, then the weak willed, and after the masses had been laid low the remaining had little to do but succumb to the pandemic.
As to how this happened, the answer once again is as simple as the problem: there was more bad news than good.

It is easy to blame the media for an event of this nature as they were the ones feeding us despair on a silver spoon but ultimately, we still choose to gorge ourselves on it. We could have found alternative information sources, we could have scavenged for ourselves, but that would have required us to open our shutters and use our voices to speak with our neighbours, which seemed far too bothersome of a thought.

It was fear that kept us shackled to our keyboards and pleasureboxes. The fear however was not the one propagated to us by the media. We were not truly afraid to listen to the world because it may have hurt us. Instead, we were afraid to listen because the results of listening would have demanded action. If every person simply listened to the actual physical world around him or her, they would have had no choice but to take action

First belief was lost, and once that was gone hope shortly followed. Without hope and belief people simply lay down and died as they are just as precious to us as water and sunshine.
A great silence fell over the earth for the first time in millennia and planet earth could finally get a full night’s sleep, yet Mother Nature was not happy. It’s true the human’s were a troublesome lot, but they always had that glimmer of potential in their eye. No teacher wants any student to fail, no matter how much of a troublemaker than are, especially one with as much potential as humanity. If only humanity had listened when she was trying to teach it a lesson.

If anyone is still reading you probably think the ending is weak and possibly simple. Perhaps it ends too soon, too sharp, too sudden breaking up what seemed like a promising future and a glimmer of hope. I am not going to disagree with you, but instead, going to challenge you to listen. What needs to be changed here isn’t the ending but the entire story itself.