Good Morning

A man with special, psychic gifts finds himself isolated and unable to participate in a world of extreme censorship and political correctness.

Many years ago I wished a man good morning and was fined seventeen hundred credits for doing so.  The man, a neighbor who I didn’t know very well but would see around occasionally, reported me to the authorities.  Apparently, after my greeting, he went into an emotionally distressed state because, in reality, his morning had not been going so well.  He contacted the authorities who showed up and took his statement.  A medical team arrived with a distress kit and checked him out and determined that he was, in fact, emotionally distressed and would require a brief stay in the hospital for treatment.  The authorities then questioned me about the altercation.  When I explained to them what happened I was formally cited with inflicting emotional distress by verbal assault, and was ticketed and fined.

My case was the 812th case like it that year, and it was only March when I was cited.  Various new protest groups, as usual, organized to come up with a solution to end the cruelty inflicted on others by people like me, collecting petitions, marching, etc., finally assembling an international collective of demonstrators directed by these groups to pressure world governments to ban the use of the word “good” in “good morning.”  The new laws were passed swiftly and “good” was eliminated from the salutary lexicon, added to the list we received each week of newly banned words and phrases deemed offensive or insensitive to the larger populace.

This is the world that I was born into.  My parents, and probably their parents too, were brought up in this world.  They were thought of as happy times, but I don’t really remember it that way anymore.  I don’t remember much before I got sick.  We were advanced.  We were tolerant and sensitive to the feelings of others.  We’d moved beyond prejudice and hatred, into a state of evolution where we all were able to get along and be happy with one another.

I was first diagnosed with my condition when I started hearing things, voices really, specific voices of people I came into contact with.  The voices were not the words that came from their mouths, but words that seemed to come from elsewhere.  Their mouths spoke the common language, but this strange communication that was broadcasting for my ears spoke words outside of the limits of the language as I knew it.  At first I thought it was gibberish.  I asked my mother about these words and she shrugged as I heard her voice utter an alarmed, “oh god!”  It wasn’t gibberish.  My mother knew what these words were.  Others must as well.

I started to repeat some of these words, incorporating them into my own speech, and I noticed that some people became very nervous and fearful when I did.  Some were confused.  Some people cried or screamed in horror.  Some turned and ran the other way.  My mother told me to stop speaking that way and took me to the doctor.  This doctor visit led me to a line of tests that went on for days and days.  They scanned my brain, took my blood, and asked hundreds of questions as they peered at me over their clipboards.

“Where did you hear these utterances?” one of the specialists inquired.

“I hear them everyday.”

“From whom?  Who is using these…uh, word sounds?  It is important that you tell us.”

“From everybody.  From you”

“I’ve said no such thing and never would,” balked the specialist.

“But I hear them everywhere I go.  I can’t stop it.  Their lips don’t move but they are speaking this way to each other, and to me.”

Another specialist entered the room and conferenced with the other.  That was the end of the meeting.  I was forced to stay in the hospital overnight in order to meet with some kind of high ranking government official the following day.  I was scared.  

The next day I met with the official named Mr. Thoms.  He was an older man in a dark suit, very calm and kind until you looked into his empty eyes.  It was Mr. Thoms who informed my parents and I that I was chronically sick and there was little chance of recovering from my mental condition.  It was a rare defect in the brain that nobody knew much about, but, though he didn’t say explicitly, I understood that he was saying that I had somehow developed the ability to hear the thoughts of other people.  There had been several similar cases over the previous few years, occurring with increasing regularity, though it was kept quiet for obvious reasons.  I was to spend my years until adulthood in an institution, with others sick like me, guarded from the remainder of society.  Or they were guarded from us.

At 18 I was moved to a residential community that served others with my condition.

I still heard the voices of people and after a while it didn’t bother me anymore.  It was entertainment.  I found out through years of listening to the inner thoughts and feelings and expressions of others that the world was not at all as we had been led to believe.  People hated each other.  They teased and abused one another, often for no apparent reason.  They verbally lusted after each other with the most shocking metaphors and innuendoes.  It was just who they were.  Who we all are.  Somehow they had been conditioned over many years to suppress their inner thoughts and feelings in favor of newly prescribed forms of behavior and interactions.  The peace and contentment of the world was an illusion.  Behind that curtain was a more lively and violent truth.

There was also something strangely humorous in all of the things I heard, as I learned to understand it.  Some of the “cruel” things people thought of one another were not only meant to be endearing but were also very funny.  This had been lost somehow through the decades.  The things that we all laughed at now seemed more like things we had agreed by consensus were allowed to be funny, whether they were funny or not.  Our so-called advanced humor had become humorless without us even realizing it, which I found to be humorous in itself.

Everything we said in our daily dialogue was pre-packaged, pre-approved, and recited by rote.  We had lost the ability to question anything.  What passed for critical thought was what we were told, and trusted was thought of critically, presumably by others before us.  All we had to do was recite it and that passed for intelligent discourse.  That was supposed to be enough to keep us on a continuous advancement towards an unknown end.

Our happy world that I was born into suddenly seemed not so happy.  Its apparent brightness was not enlightenment as we had all believed for so long, but the blinding glow of a spotlight that kept us all suspiciously in each others gaze.  We were watched and listened to, spied on by those closest to us. Smiles masked a wary skepticism of others, turning neighbors into informers on one another.  Anything even the slightest bit salty that came from the mouth of one could be deemed offensive, without regard for context and intent, and then you would be arrested and fined, temporarily excommunicated from the tribe of humanity until you were welcomed back through a continuous and saccharine recitation of public apologies and platitudes.  But it kept everybody in line, on eggshells, and after generations turned the illusion into concrete reality.

All of this was done under the auspices of tolerance and compassion and freedom.  How the power of abstractions can warp the brain.  This wasn’t sentiment.  Sentiment was one of those abstract virtues our advanced claims to the triumph of reason and logic have rendered nonessential, like love and faith.  Our culture was now pillared by mechanical actions and mechanical statements defined as compassion but devoid of real feeling.  They repeat their conditioned and approved platitudes and salutations as some kind of pavlovian response to their environment.  But people like me laugh at them, laugh and smile at the unacknowledged revelation that there is still a heartbeat within many of them, with real blood pumping violently through it, even if they choose to remain ignorant of it.  I laugh because I am an evolutionary biproduct of this world, my sickness a biological reaction to it, and as more people like me emerge with this mental defect we will have no choice but to watch this sterile world crumble to pieces.  Everyone speaks the true speech of past generations within those hearts of theirs, with all of its indecency and vulgarity and humor and cruelty and passion and hatred and love, even as they walk around with their hands clasped over their hearts in false piety and sympathy with their fellow man’s presumed sensitivity.

I don’t know what happens now.  What do you do when you are told your whole life that you are sick and only later discover that it is not you who is sick, but rather everyone else.  Since my “good morning” incident, within my community of those with little involvement in the rest of society, I’ve only realized that the attitudes that I was kept from with my condition have now seeped into my world.  I want no part of it.  I keep to myself now.  I know the things that remain locked up in the hearts of the rest of them, and so I wait.  More than that I am aware of what is in my own heart.  I can no longer hide my contempt for them, nor can they hide theirs behind their smiles.  None of this has instilled in me a sense of love and compassion for my fellow man.  Their phoniness and hypersensitivity, their neurotic compulsion to condemn others at perceived offenses is too much to bear.  I now accept my bitterness and my hatred for them as though it were love.  It is the only genuine thing that I feel anymore.  Anything that made them human has been long suppressed in favor of projecting a false image of somebody else’s human ideal.  I don’t want to associate with these lobotomized, colorless, flavorless beings.  No more fines and citations for me.  No more life for me.  No more associations or relationships.  I only want to burn with this hatred at the hottest state until the wick is diminished to nothing and the flame ceases to be.  It is the only authentic pleasure to be derived from this life anymore, and I want to burn out with it until the very end.  And then I want to wake up and say, good morning to you.  

Reviews

[J. K. Beach]

Wayne, I haven't been around much lately, but I return to find many of my friends penning super work. This is no exception. What a complete picture of political correctness carried far to far... It is just so well done I can only call it Bradburyesque...my ideal for this genre. You have crafted a gem! I'll have to read more soon...

JKB

[Wayne Rockmore]

Thank you very much for the kind words. I had been reading a lot of Bradbury around the time I was thinking this one up, so its very flattering to hear that his influence informed the story. Thanks again!