The Press Gang

Cast:
Mother...........The media
Children.........The public

Mother draws a blanket over her children. Her face is fixed in a grimace. She believes that she is comforting and protecting her brood. Her mechanical certainty doesn't allow her to consider the possibility that the blanket has come too far; that she is befouling the air her children breathe; that the slow dulling of the mind and the gradual seductive loss of consciousness is not of sleep, but of the death of the mind. This is no crime. There is no victim. The children consent, as they have always done from years of love and fulfilled expectation. Years when they saw their mother protect them; tell them of the world; make them laugh and cry at her stories that brought the galaxy to life. They never felt the change as mother, running out of truth, substituted falsehood. The little wisdom that their open minds were offered in the early years was diluted quickly. They had forgotten the depth of their response to myth. They thrilled to the increasingly explicit mix of violence and sex which mother's stories had acquired in her effort to hold their jaded interest. Wisdom had been diluted long ago by the sheer volume of data. The data revealed no pattern, yielded no revelation about the world, because every piece was chosen not for its truth, but for its effect. Mother sill made a desperate effort to hold back self awareness and the self disgust that she new was lurking close behind. The navigation beacon that mother used, her only guiding principle, was balance - every piece of data must have an opposite, equally weighted. The stupefied expression on the children's faces gradually froze in death. Their was no change to their glazed eyes.