Going Back 3
Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
This is not what she signed up for when she climbed into that truck all those weeks ago. She understands that that does not really matter. What she thought she was getting herself into is pretty irrelevant in contrast to what she is seeing in front of her. Everything is so off kilter (and simultaneously so many of the things that she just could not sort out in her head are suddenly making perfect sense with this as context).
[more]
She would really like for someone to explain to her how everything around her managed to disintegrate so quickly. She is desperate for some way to make sense of how fast the world (her world) became a place where she would see the sorts of things that she has been seeing - the sort of place where the board in front of her is anything other than part of a set for some dystopian movie.
She is not naive. In fact, she is pretty far from it. Her father did not raise his daughter to look at the world through some sort of rose colored glasses. People might have their own thoughts about what a man whose calling had been what her father’s had been might do to someone’s sense or perception of the motivations of the people around them - that was not Heather’s world. Her father had never tried to hide from her that there were people in the world that were set on doing the wrong thing for a variety of reasons up to and including the simple fact that they could. What her father had been a proponent of (and a liver out of for all the days that she had been around to observe him) was that people needed to be shown and offered a change to find their way back from trailing after those destructive sorts of paths. No one had ever said that everyone would choose the correction, but her father had been a provider of support and encouragement for those that had. Heather had loved that about him - and equally loved the fact that he had never let the disappointments that inevitably arose from such expectations sour him on continuing to offer such chances to others as well. She doesn’t know what her dad would have made of this. She knows what he would have said and she has a pretty good idea of what he would have done, but she would really like some scope of the why of it all (and she is not so sure that even her thoughtful and people understanding father would have been able to give it to her).
She has always truly believed (and maybe that means that her perspective is more tilted than she thought) that there were more people who would choose the right thing to do because it was the right thing to do than those who went out of their way to not. She does not like the way that the people she is encountering lately seem bound and determined to knock that out of her and disabuse her of such a notion via any means necessary. These are not strangers in some third world dictatorship or even less than ethical merchants conducting a disgusting trade barely hidden behind some curtains in the recesses of an old fair ground.
These are people that she has known all of her life. These are people whose children she tutored once upon a time on breaks from college or whose car batteries she changed out for them in the grocery store parking lot when she was a teenager.
Some of them are even people that sat a few pews over from her throughout her childhood. She should not be looking around the town where she grew up and trying to discern and divide people by level of trustworthiness as to what kind of orders she believes they would be willing to take before finally (if they ever reached a point of finally) saying no.
This has gone beyond surreal and into the realm of things of which fever dreams are constructed. She does not know what to do about it. This is not something with parts and pieces that she can deconstruct and turn around and put back together to make them right again. This may be beyond her ability to correct, but it is not beyond her ability to try. She kind of has to - who else is there? She cannot unknow what she knows. This has, unfortunately, been laid in her lap for her to deal with it and dealing with it is what she is going to have to do - she just kind of wishes that she had a little more time at her disposal to come up with something better than the spur of the moment plan that she is going to have to employ here.
She is not a very big fan of spur of the moment - she likes to plan. She likes outlines. She likes knowing the gist of how things are going to go down when she starts to tackle something, but she has been being shoved into fly by the seat of your pants territory for some time now (enough to recognize when that is what the situation calls for in any case). Time is not on her side here. Time is not on anyone’s side here.
She came back home to help (a little bit to run away from the awkwardness of one of her not so brilliant spur of the moment actions) because she had seen a way that she could provide something of value to both the place where she grew up and to her adopted town at the same time. In truth, the windmills had been a better design than she had hoped for - it was a genuine trade good that New Bern was in a position to take advantage of, but there were a lot of other bits of reality that were pressing in on the place. It was a way to ease some of the pressure, but it was not going to be a cure all. She was sympathetic to the fact that there were a lot of people in a relatively small area and that population density made everything more difficult, but that did not excuse any of this. There was no magic wand to wave to fix the situation of an area that had more people than it could comfortably feed, but there were a lot of avenues that appeared to be overlooked in favor of blaming and driving into a frenzy in an attempt to set up a little warlord wannabee regime. That was not happening on her watch - not if there was literally anything in her power to do to change that.
Thus, she will be going with the fly by the seat of her pants, spur of the moment plan because that is what she has to work with - she’ll roll with it because that is, apparently, what she does now.
This is not what she signed up for when she climbed into that truck all those weeks ago. She understands that that does not really matter. What she thought she was getting herself into is pretty irrelevant in contrast to what she is seeing in front of her. Everything is so off kilter (and simultaneously so many of the things that she just could not sort out in her head are suddenly making perfect sense with this as context).
[more]
She would really like for someone to explain to her how everything around her managed to disintegrate so quickly. She is desperate for some way to make sense of how fast the world (her world) became a place where she would see the sorts of things that she has been seeing - the sort of place where the board in front of her is anything other than part of a set for some dystopian movie.
She is not naive. In fact, she is pretty far from it. Her father did not raise his daughter to look at the world through some sort of rose colored glasses. People might have their own thoughts about what a man whose calling had been what her father’s had been might do to someone’s sense or perception of the motivations of the people around them - that was not Heather’s world. Her father had never tried to hide from her that there were people in the world that were set on doing the wrong thing for a variety of reasons up to and including the simple fact that they could. What her father had been a proponent of (and a liver out of for all the days that she had been around to observe him) was that people needed to be shown and offered a change to find their way back from trailing after those destructive sorts of paths. No one had ever said that everyone would choose the correction, but her father had been a provider of support and encouragement for those that had. Heather had loved that about him - and equally loved the fact that he had never let the disappointments that inevitably arose from such expectations sour him on continuing to offer such chances to others as well. She doesn’t know what her dad would have made of this. She knows what he would have said and she has a pretty good idea of what he would have done, but she would really like some scope of the why of it all (and she is not so sure that even her thoughtful and people understanding father would have been able to give it to her).
She has always truly believed (and maybe that means that her perspective is more tilted than she thought) that there were more people who would choose the right thing to do because it was the right thing to do than those who went out of their way to not. She does not like the way that the people she is encountering lately seem bound and determined to knock that out of her and disabuse her of such a notion via any means necessary. These are not strangers in some third world dictatorship or even less than ethical merchants conducting a disgusting trade barely hidden behind some curtains in the recesses of an old fair ground.
These are people that she has known all of her life. These are people whose children she tutored once upon a time on breaks from college or whose car batteries she changed out for them in the grocery store parking lot when she was a teenager.
Some of them are even people that sat a few pews over from her throughout her childhood. She should not be looking around the town where she grew up and trying to discern and divide people by level of trustworthiness as to what kind of orders she believes they would be willing to take before finally (if they ever reached a point of finally) saying no.
This has gone beyond surreal and into the realm of things of which fever dreams are constructed. She does not know what to do about it. This is not something with parts and pieces that she can deconstruct and turn around and put back together to make them right again. This may be beyond her ability to correct, but it is not beyond her ability to try. She kind of has to - who else is there? She cannot unknow what she knows. This has, unfortunately, been laid in her lap for her to deal with it and dealing with it is what she is going to have to do - she just kind of wishes that she had a little more time at her disposal to come up with something better than the spur of the moment plan that she is going to have to employ here.
She is not a very big fan of spur of the moment - she likes to plan. She likes outlines. She likes knowing the gist of how things are going to go down when she starts to tackle something, but she has been being shoved into fly by the seat of your pants territory for some time now (enough to recognize when that is what the situation calls for in any case). Time is not on her side here. Time is not on anyone’s side here.
She came back home to help (a little bit to run away from the awkwardness of one of her not so brilliant spur of the moment actions) because she had seen a way that she could provide something of value to both the place where she grew up and to her adopted town at the same time. In truth, the windmills had been a better design than she had hoped for - it was a genuine trade good that New Bern was in a position to take advantage of, but there were a lot of other bits of reality that were pressing in on the place. It was a way to ease some of the pressure, but it was not going to be a cure all. She was sympathetic to the fact that there were a lot of people in a relatively small area and that population density made everything more difficult, but that did not excuse any of this. There was no magic wand to wave to fix the situation of an area that had more people than it could comfortably feed, but there were a lot of avenues that appeared to be overlooked in favor of blaming and driving into a frenzy in an attempt to set up a little warlord wannabee regime. That was not happening on her watch - not if there was literally anything in her power to do to change that.
Thus, she will be going with the fly by the seat of her pants, spur of the moment plan because that is what she has to work with - she’ll roll with it because that is, apparently, what she does now.