The Guardians of Freedom - Part 4 (standard:other, 8971 words) [4/7] show all parts
Author: Dan Tana	Added: May 04 2011	Views/Reads: 2157/1583	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The Guardians of Freedom stop the vendetta of a wounded child and prevent the eradication of the human race.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

her situation with Arthur, because he is an adult and she is just a 
child.  These people stubbornly refused to ever look past that shallow 
rationalization, and would not admit that there is even the tiniest 
possibility that Marcia might not really need them to protect her from 
Arthur, no matter how often or how clearly she explained to them that 
there is no exact correlation between the age of a person and any of 
that person's other attributes. 

They would not take off the psychological blinder of their age-based
prejudice, for even one moment, because it shielded their minds from 
the glaring, unpleasant awareness of how their own actions were 
traumatizing and emotionally damaging this child, which they did not 
ever want to face.  So Marcia spent most of her time during the next 
few weeks crying, and screaming, beating her fists against a wall, and 
raging futilely against the obstinately inconsiderate way in which 
these people were tormenting her. 

Then Arthur was assaulted and murdered by a fellow prisoner, just hours
after he was sentenced to several years in prison for illegally 
pleasing Marcia.  The perpetrator of that attack claimed that it had 
been motivated by disgust for what his victim had done, but I have 
looked into his mind and seen that that violent outburst was really an 
expression of unbearable, unconscious, angry jealousy of the 
delightfully sweet affections that Marcia had shared with Arthur. 

From the time that he was a child this man has wanted to play with other
people - including children, like Marcia - in all the same ways that 
Arthur had.  As time passed and the material child that he had once 
been transformed into the metaphoric inner-child of his adult psyche he 
never lost that desire to share such pleasures with another child.  But 
by the end of his adolescence he had learned to feel deeply ashamed of 
the sexual aspect of these feelings, after absorbing the vicious 
cruelty and vitriol that some human beings like to spew at any adult 
who does not deny that part of its self. 

In order to mask and burry that distressing feeling he began acting in
the same way as those people whose hateful attitudes and violent 
actions had traumatized him, eventually leading to his assault of 
Arthur, which caused even more damage to his own inner-child but 
perversely satisfied the part of him that resented what such behavior 
has done to that child.  It also served to momentarily alleviate his 
chronic fear that if he does not regularly express contempt for people 
like his victim then someone else might guess the truth of his own 
taboo desire and assault him in that same way. 

When Marcia learned what this man had done to her friend something broke
inside of her.  Something that may not ever heal.  You might call it 
her heart, and I will do so, for lack of a better word. 

Disgust, resentment, and anger at how her society had allowed certain
people to treat the two of them filled the gaping hole that Arthur's 
abduction and murder had left in her life, distracting her from the 
indescribable agony of that loss. 

A few days later she was walking along the side of a road when a truck
carrying various forms of chemical waste overturned, dousing her in a 
cocktail of highly reactive substances.  These chemicals combined to 
form several kilograms of an exotic, bluish compound, which she calls 
bloop.  This chemical bath mutated her physiology and made it possible 
for her to inhale the bloop, which is stored inside of her until she 
exhales it. 

The accident also created a mental connection between Marcia and that
bloop, which enables her to move it with her thoughts and to sense 
anything that acts upon it, even over great distances.  Her ability to 
manipulate the compound extends to the microscopic level, where she can 
rearrange its molecules and alter their kinetic energy in order to 
change the state of this matter. 

As Marcia considered the possibilities of what she could do with her new
power she realized that what had been done to her and her friend was 
itself, ultimately, all about the kind of power that allows one person 
to control the life of another.  Laws like the one that took Arthur 
away from her also take away her power of self-determination, making 
her into a sort of slave, who is not free to be her own master, though 
entirely capable. 

Then she started to think about how certain people use the word rape to
describe what she had so eagerly, knowingly, and willingly done with 
him, subtly implying that he must have forced himself on her in some 
way.  This bit of linguistic chicanery, she realized, allows them to 
then use a certain kind of force in a way that indirectly but very 
effectively serves to dominate and control her sexuality - to rape her, 
in a sense - under the terribly ironic and disgustingly obnoxious 
pretense that that very act by which they violently subjugate her 
personal life to their own will somehow protects her from just that 
kind of abuse.  And that made her really, really mad. 

She then wrapped her body in a cocoon of bloop and used it to carry
herself to the house of the policeman who had arrested Arthur. 

This policeman liked to take advantage of naive, emotionally vulnerable,
rather juvenile individuals who have just reached the so-called 'age of 
consent' that is defined by the laws of his society.  He liked to use 
these people, deviously, and legally, for sexual purposes, without the 
slightest concern for how much harm his manipulative and disingenuous 
actions would cause them, while numbing his atrophied conscience with 
the preposterous idea that their age somehow makes that okay.  And he 
also liked to look down on everyone who he called a pedophile - even 
the ones like Arthur, who treat their partner with far more honesty, 
care, and consideration than he ever has. 

Over the next few hours Marcia vented her fury and resentment upon this
predatory person.  She bound him with bands of bloop and then used a 
razor-sharp sliver to slowly shave off all of his skin.  He quickly 
wore out his voice from screaming, and then began to whimper and cry 
for mercy, hoarsely begging her to tell him what he could do to make 
her stop hurting him. 

That plea reminded her of how her own desperate, tortured pleas had not
stopped him from inflicting a horrible emotional pain on her, and then 
she began to slowly shake her head at him.  She continued cutting the 
flesh of her first tormentor and victim, relentlessly, until he died 
from the shock of unbearable agony. 

Then Marcia went off to find the judge who had sentenced Arthur to
prison.  She let him know how angry she was about what he had done and 
he immediately dismissed her feelings, insisting that her rage at him 
must just be a misdirected reaction to the things that Arthur had done 
to her.  But she was not foolish enough to believe that baseless 
assertion.  She knew exactly why she was angry, and found herself 
getting even madder as he continued trying to shift the blame for the 
emotional harm that he had so insensitively helped to cause her onto 
the shoulders of someone else who had not ever harmed her in any way. 

While he went on encouraging her to be mad at Arthur she thought about
reminding this judge of how that man had given her some of his own bone 
marrow to heal her when she was sick with leukemia, unhesitantly, 
despite the personal risk and discomfort of that operation.  But that 
had made no difference during the trial, when she first told him about 
it, and she decided that such a demonstration of love would never 
change the mind of someone who was determined to vilify Arthur for what 
he had allowed her to do.  So, instead, she used her bloop to crack 
open his chest and rip out his beating heart, as he had done, 
metaphorically, to her. 

Then she decided that it was time to punish those jurors who had all
made themselves accomplices to Arthur's persecution when they chose to 
convict him for breaking that dastardly, prejudiced law. 

When Marcia came to the home of juror number one she discovered that
this woman had a son about the same age as herself.  She imprisoned 
each of them in separate cages, behind bars of bloop.  Then, while his 
mother watched, powerless, just as Marcia had been, she used a sharp 
piece of bloop to slit the boy's throat.  As his blood spilled out onto 
the floor a scream of irrepressible grief tore itself from that woman's 
chest, and then she collapsed to the ground and began to weep. 

At that moment I happened to be passing by with my friends Avian, Neon,
and Harmony.  Neon's unusual awareness of the temporal present already 
encompassed the time when we would all confront Marcia about what she 
had just done, which is what caused us to enter the house where that 
encounter would take place. 

I looked into Marcia's mind in the instant that she saw me, observing
her sense of surprise and amusement.  My appearance reminded her of a 
stuffed toy that she used to take with her everywhere she went, which 
she had named Mister Fuzzy Head.  It wasn't actually alive, not like 
me, but the power of her imagination had imbued that toy with the 
character and personality of a silly and playful, courageous, fiercely 
protective, kindhearted companion and friend.  In their years together 
Mister Fuzzy Head brought Marcia immense quantities of emotional 
comfort and joy, and a fair degree of physical pleasure when she rubbed 
its fluff against her flesh. 

Then there came a day when her mother declared that Marcia was too old
to still be carrying around a stuffed animal.  With the conscious part 
of her brain she thought that it was unseemly - and a poor reflection 
on herself as a parent - for her daughter to be so attached to that toy 
at her age.  But when I scanned her on a deeper level I saw that this 
belief was rooted in an emotional trauma of her own childhood, when her 
mentally unstable mother had declared that no child would be allowed to 
play with a stuffed animal past a certain age.  That arbitrary and 
capricious edict had upset her very much at the time, but since then 
her unconscious mind had discovered that she can alleviate some portion 
of that distress by choosing to believe that her mother had been right 
to enforce such a law. 

And so she inflicted that same rule upon her own daughter, commanding
her to dispose of Mister Fuzzy Head.  But Marcia refused.  She 
anxiously clutched the toy to her chest.  And then her mother took hold 
of it and violently ripped it from her arms.  When Marcia tried to grab 
it back the woman slapped her, hard enough to knock her to the ground.  
As she watched, sobbing ferociously, shrieking, and begging for it to 
be spared, her mother placed Mister Fuzzy Head into a fireplace, doused 
it with lighter fluid, and set its fluff ablaze. 

In the years since then she repressed the trauma of that ghastly
experience, but it never stopped haunting her.  The psychic scar of 
that sudden, senseless loss left her always feeling a subtle anxiety 
that everything she loves might be stolen from her at any moment.  The 
feeling of complete powerlessness that her mother inflicted upon her 
cast a shadow of helplessness and futility over everything that she 
tried to do.  And the dull ache of emptiness that was left in her chest 
after Mister Fuzzy Head had turned to ashes, though numbed by time to 
an imperceptible intensity, never left her. 

As she stared at my own fuzzy head and was reminded of that old toy I
saw what she was planning to do to the people who had taken her new, 
even more beloved playmate away from her.  I examined her vindictive 
impulse to make these people suffer in retribution for their crimes, 
and, even though I knew that it would numb her pain for a little while, 
I discouraged her from pursuing that vengeance, because I could see 
that it would not bring her any real peace or happiness. 

Indulging this desire to punish the people who hurt her would not
achieve true justice for Marcia - as I understand that concept - 
because it would not negate the unjustified harm that had been done to 
her, which cannot be undone.  It would just prolong her misery, by 
sidetracking her from the difficult task of learning to accept and make 
peace with the utterly unjust reality of how she had been victimized, 
which is a vital step in the process of recovering from the trauma of 
that irrevocable loss. 

And by inflicting her retribution upon the guilty she would also be
harming the innocent, which I would do everything in my power to 
prevent. 

So I blocked her way to the door, and projected a reflection of Marcia's
own misery back into her mind, and told her that that was how the 
friends of her victims would feel.  And for an instant she comprehended 
the horror of what she wanted to do.  But then anger eclipsed that 
awareness, and she told me to just shut up.  She pushed past me and 
floated toward the door. 

Avian shot the door with one of her feathers and telekinetically shut
it.  Marcia pulled on the doorknob, but could not make it budge.  Then 
she flung sharp shards of bloop at Avian, which were deflected away 
from her by the film of psycho-reactive oil that is produced by her 
wings.  Avian hurled several of her feathers at Marcia, which cracked 
the shell of bloop that surrounded her but did not break through it.  
The bloop liquefied for a moment and then resolidified, leaving no 
trace of those cracks. 

Harmony then absorbed the energy of his white phantom into his body.  He
struck that bloop-covered form, focusing all of that energy into a blow 
of supernatural force.  The shell shattered to pieces, flying apart, 
leaving Marcia momentarily defenseless but completely unharmed.  In 
that instant Neon pounced, grabbing her around the neck. 

I warned Marcia that that brightly color and animalistic woman would rip
out her throat if she tried to attack us again, and then she stopped 
struggling.  Neon released the child, but remained alert for any signs 
of renewed hostility.  Then the two of us took her outside while 
Harmony and Avian tended to that mother who continued to weep over the 
body of her dead son. 

I projecting Marcia's tragic tale into the minds of my associates. 

Then Neon told Marcia that she and her son had also been the victims of
a similar oppression, and that she had initially reacted by trying to 
punish those responsible.  But I came along just as she was about to 
kill the man who had abused her son by arresting him for doing 
something that is not in any way abusive of anyone else, and together 
we convinced that man to stop denying the despicable nature of what he 
had done to that child. 

Then he decided to try to undo all of the harm that he had caused to
other people, and dedicated his life to protecting people from those 
who enforce such domineering laws.  And Neon realized that her talents 
were better used assisting us Guardians in our mission to educate and 
reform such villains, whenever possible, rather than killing them 
indiscriminately. 

The rational part of Marcia's mind understood what Neon was telling her,
but the angry part did not want to hear it.  After several moments of 
conflicted thought she insisted that Neon's experience was not at all 
like her own, and held no relevance to her situation, because her son 
was still alive, not rotting in the ground like Arthur. 

So then I asked her if her murders had eased the pain of losing Arthur,
which I knew that they had not.  As she thought about that I reminded 
Marcia that it was his gentle kindness and forgiving nature that had 
first made her fall in love with him, along with his silly playfulness 
and the devoted way in which he cared for her.  I then informed her 
that I had met him shortly before his arrest, and had seen how much she 
meant to him.  And I told her that I believed that he would have been 
very sad to think that she was going to let the lust for vengeance 
consume and poison the rest of her life. 

When Marcia heard me say that a look of surprise crossed her face, as it
occurred to her that she believed the same thing but had somehow not 
realized it.  Then she let out a weary sigh, let go of her vengeful 
aspiration, and collapsed into my arms as an immense wave of grief, no 
longer dammed by fury, crashed over her.  For the next few hours she 
soaked my fur with her tears, which did not stop flowing until the 
break of dawn, when she finally fell asleep. 

Over the following days I spent many hours trying to help her heal the
wound in her heart.  But it continued to fester.  The only respite from 
her chronic agony came when she slept, when she was reunited with the 
ghost of Arthur in her dreams, in a place where nobody could ever take 
him away from her again.  There she felt all the joy that he had given 
her, and reveled in the exhilarating yet serene bliss of his 
affectionate embrace. 

I projected an image of myself into those dreams and spoke to her
subconscious mind, trying to convince her that in her waking hours she 
could hold on to that love and peace that she felt in the dream world.  
But the acute awareness of Arthur's absence returned to torment her as 
soon as she awoke, and Marcia wished only to return to the tranquil 
oblivion of sleep.  Eventually she decided that in order to end her 
pain she would use a drug to make herself sleep forever. 

On the day after Marcia put herself into a chemically induced coma my
friend Harmony and I decided to spend the afternoon bowling.  As we 
walked to the bowling alley we encountered a living, intelligent fire 
that had decided to burn down a house with several people trapped 
inside.  Among the people in that burning building was the woman who 
created the fire, who had kept it confined in a laboratory and 
subjected it to some very disagreeable experiments during the first few 
months of its life. 

I tried to talk with the fire, but it was too mad and miserable to want
to listen.  The malevolent, cruel, destructive attitude that it 
embraced formed a calloused shell around the most sensitive parts of 
its psyche, shielding its consciousness from the worst pains of an 
existence that is so pitifully devoid of any genuine happiness.  And it 
was not brave enough to face that part of its self, so it hid behind a 
scornful rejection of all that I had to say, and clung to that 
comforting maliciousness. 

Meanwhile, some firemen showed up and tried to extinguish the blaze, but
were unable to stop this very angry being because it could move out of 
the way of the streams of water that they shot at it with their hoses. 

Harmony thought that he could use the power of his white phantom to stop
the fire, but he had expended its energy only a few days before and it 
had not yet regenerated.  So he took his black phantom and turned it 
inside out, which transforms the power of one of these projections into 
that of the other, as he had recently discovered.  Then he infused the 
tissues of his body with the energy of that remaining phantom, took a 
deep breath, and blew out the fire while leaving the house completely 
intact. 

The few smoldering embers that remained were gathered together and put
into a fireproof box before they could reignite.  As two firemen 
carried the box away I saw in the mind of one of them a determination 
to keep that fire locked up forever, until it burned out entirely - 
even if it is someday rehabilitated so that its incarceration no longer 
serves to protect other people from any harm but only causes harm 
unnecessarily. 

At the exact same moment I saw the fireman who was carrying the other
end of the box think that the fire deserved to be punished for a 
certain, predetermined period of time.  He assumed, in some vague and 
unsubstantiated way, that this criminal owed some kind of debt to all 
of society, which would somehow be repaid by its unproductive 
incarceration.  After that the fire would be released, even if it had 
not been rehabilitated and still posed a danger to others. 

I stopped these men and helped them to see beyond all of the
rationalizations that they used to excuse their desire to hurt that 
criminal, teaching them that what they each wanted to do to it in the 
name of justice was really primarily about satisfying the malevolence 
in their own hearts, more than it was about protecting the innocent, or 
repairing the injuries of its victims, or making this world a less 
unjust and unhappy place.  They eventually admitted that fact to 
themselves.  Then they both promised that they would not let the fire 
out of the box before it has reformed, or allow anyone to keep it 
locked in there when that is no longer necessary. 

After that I had a conversation with the scientist who had created the
fire, and made sure that she would not be subjecting any more people to 
the same kind of unhappy existence that had provoked its wrath. 

That evening, when we had finished bowling, Harmony and I decided to
cook dinner for our friends.  He was chopping some carrots when he 
suddenly stopped, mid chop, looked up at me, and without preamble 
asked, "Hey, Teddy, do you want to help me start a band?" 

As we finished cooking our stew he went on to explain that ever since I
helped him to integrate his disparate personalities and embrace the 
full spectrum of his power his ability to sing had greatly increased.  
His voice had acquired a depth, richness, and complexity that it had 
previously lacked, which seem to be quite superhuman in nature.  And he 
had just then decided that he was going to sing professionally as part 
of a musical group. 

Harmony wanted me to assist him in this endeavor because I play the
xylophone, and an electric didgeridoo, which he though would bring an 
interesting and unique sound to the band.  At dinner he asked Hypergirl 
to join us, because she is able to play the guitar, drums, and bass - 
all at the same time.  And then he asked Bertron to lend us her unusual 
musical talent.  Being a robot, she can play a virtual synthesizer by 
running an interactive midi program parallel to her primary cognitive 
functions, which interfaces with her sound card to produce an audio 
signal that can be output through her vocalization speaker or 
redirected to one of her external data ports. 

Over the next few weeks we practiced playing together, developing the
tone and style of our group.  At one of our rehearsals Bertron 
suggested that we call the band Flufftopia, which the rest of us 
unanimously approved. 

During those weeks I wrote a collection of songs that recount the
primordial history of the people who I call the Goo, who were once a 
species as physically and mentally limited as you humans, and as 
barbaric, when they lived in a dimension just like this one.  But their 
violent, chaotic, miserable history eventually came to an end, with the 
help of a strange and fluffy and very friendly being from another 
dimension.  This person taught them to see through the ideas that 
imprisoned their minds, and helped them to comprehend the enormous 
implications of the very simple, often overlooked fact that people who 
are genuinely happy usually like to do things that create more 
happiness while people who are unhappy frequently act in ways that 
create more unhappiness. 

Some Goo historians speculate that this legendary visitor was not a real
historical person but merely a character in a story written by one of 
the proto-Goo.  But they all agree that it doesn't make any practical 
difference to their present existence if that person ever had a 
physical incarnation.  The truly relevant fact is that the ideas 
represented by this figure once inspired a movement within their 
species that eventually culminated in their abandonment of all those 
ideologies and social structures that some of them had created to 
justify and enable their practice of legally subjugating and tormenting 
others. 

Then they no longer had to waste their lives resisting and enduring the
oppressions of others, and no longer had to constantly rebuild all that 
was destroyed through ceaseless warring, and were free to devote all of 
their energies to doing things and creating things that made their 
world an ever more and more delightful place to live.  Over the ensuing 
millennia of peaceful prosperity they built the technology and tools 
that would eventually enable them to construct a new, transcendently 
blissful dimension of reality, which is where they were living when 
they made me. 

While we recorded these songs our friend Cain set up a website for the
band. 

You can download all of our music from this site, for whatever price the
songs are worth to you.  If you want to download them for free you are 
welcome to do that, too, since it does not cost us anything when you 
copy these files and we are not so atrociously, myopically selfish that 
we would want to deny you the pleasure of this music that we have 
created just because we will not personally profit from your enjoyment 
of it. 

Then Cain moved to Australia, so that he could study the behavior of
Koalas in their natural habitat, which he has wanted to do from as far 
back as he can remember. 

There he discovered a newly formed social organization called the
Democracy, in which each citizen utilizes a neural transceiver device 
to mentally interface with a network of computer servers that allows 
them to access a virtual forum where they can discuss, debate, and vote 
on issues of government policy. 

Many citizens of the Democracy believed this invention to be a wonderful
thing, which would soon rid the world of all tyranny and oppression.  
But I was skeptical of that optimism, because a pure democracy is 
nothing more than an absolute tyranny of the majority.  Perhaps that is 
in some way better than the kind of tyranny that is inflicted by a 
small minority, but it is no less harmful to each individual who is 
victimized by it. 

I certainly do believe that it is best for people to be able to
democratically elect and unelect those who run a government.  But 
democracy alone, in any of its forms, is simply not enough to ensure 
universal freedom, despite the supercilious assertions of some of its 
more fanatical proponents. 

Quite to the contrary, the erroneous assumption that democracy equals
freedom and justice can actually promote the creation of abusive social 
institutions, by giving people an excuse to think that they are 
justified in voting for any politician or law that will psychologically 
gratify or pragmatically benefit them, no matter how severely it 
infringes upon the well-being of some other people. 

That attitude eventually led the citizens of the Democracy to pass a law
that denies the aboriginal people of Australia the same legal status 
and protections enjoyed by others, putting them into a permanent state 
of indentured servitude, supposedly for the greater good of that 
society, of course, which really just means that this law benefits the 
non-aboriginal majority that created it. 

And the majority of older people passed a resolution that denies equal
treatment under the law to anyone younger than the age of twenty-three 
years, even taking away their legal ability to vote - irrespective of 
their actual ability to make decisions - which increases the relative 
power of those older people and ensures that the younger people cannot 
oppose their oppression through the apparatus of the Democracy itself. 

Then the Christian majority made it illegal to wear the traditional
clothing of certain Muslim communities, and also banned the building of 
mosques in certain areas where it is legal for them to build their 
churches. 

The majority of people who had a place to live decided to make it
illegal to be homeless, though not illegal for their society to deny 
some people any place where they can be at home while some homes remain 
vacant and unused. 

And the right-handed majority passed a resolution that calls it a crime
to thumb wrestle or arm wrestle with the left hand, under some specious 
pretense about how it is morally wrong to not use the right hand, but 
really because a right-handed match gives them a personal advantage 
over all left-handed competitors. 

Also, the majority that wanted to marry someone of a different gender
decided to make it illegal for people of the same gender to marry each 
other, even though the legal rights and responsibilities that define 
the secular institution of marriage within their society do not depend 
in any essential way upon the gender of the people involved. 

Then the narrow female majority made up a law that prohibits any male
person from holding any public office. 

When Cain told me what was going on I went to speak with the citizens of
the Democracy, hoping that I could convince them of the importance of 
making some very significant changes in the philosophical basis of that 
organization. 

I told them that in order to create a society with real liberty and
justice for all it is essential to first acknowledge and address the 
fact that the great majority of people with any power over others - 
whether it is the power of an unchallenged dictatorship or the power of 
a single democratic vote among millions - will want to use that power 
in whatever way suits them personally, deliberately or unconsciously, 
at the expense of anyone else. 

And then it is necessary to find some way to inspire the majority of
people in that society to make the choice to resist the temptation of 
all of those alluring and seemingly reasonable excuses that people 
constantly invent to try to justify and camouflage their tyrannical 
uses of power, so that they renounce these excuses personally and 
refuse to accept them from others. 

As you might expect, I had very little luck convincing the people who
passed and profited from those iniquitous laws to admit that they had 
no right to do so.  But I did not give up on the citizens of the 
Democracy.  Despite the exasperating stubbornness with which the 
majority of them insisted on trying to subjugate the rest I kept trying 
to help these people to save themselves from themselves. 

So I encouraged them to utilize their power to pass a decree that
acknowledges the sovereign dominion that each individual holds over its 
own person and life.  That, unfortunately, would not be sufficient to 
prevent people from finding some excuse to enforce laws that either 
directly or indirectly infringe upon the sovereign freedom of others - 
because it is not always possible to determine exactly where the 
freedom of each person is justly limited by the equal freedom of all 
others.  But it would at least help to remind everyone that it is not 
okay to do so. 

And I suggested that they change the name of their organization to the
Sovocracy, which is a word that I have invented for you air-speakers to 
use as a translation of the Gooi thought-signal that describes a social 
government structured as an alliance of sovereign individuals that 
exists to protect the freedom of all people and to ensure our 
happiness. 

While I was doing that a bright column of light descended from the sky,
striking the ground several miles away.  I traveled to the edge of this 
rather unusual phenomenon, in the company of two other Guardians. 

As I looked into this tower of radiance my optic sensors overloaded,
temporarily blinding me.  Then I shielded my useless eyes from that 
distracting light, and in the clear darkness of that moment detected a 
bit of consciousness at its heart.  I focused my thought detection 
device on the location of that awareness, behind that veil of 
illumination, and observed the mind of a woman who floated there. 

I scanned that mind and first learned that she answers to the name
Leena.  Then I discovered that she was planning to use that blaze of 
electromagnetic radiation to kill every human being on this planet, 
driven by an immense anger at the state of human civilization. 

This incandescent fury that fueled her campaign of destruction had its
deepest roots in an incident that occurred years before.  It happened 
one day while Leena was out walking with her dearly beloved aunt, who 
had taken care of her ever since her parents were murdered for speaking 
out against the authoritarian laws of their society.  The woman tripped 
over a small rock and fell down, accidentally exposing the flesh of her 
leg, in violation of a local law. 

This accident was witnessed by one of the morality police of their
village, who are paid by the government to wander the streets and beat 
citizens for any public infraction of the approved moral code.  As 
Leena stood there and watched in helpless terror that man assaulted her 
aunt for that transgression.  The attack caused injuries that first 
crippled and eventually killed the woman.  It also scarred the child 
irreparably. 

Several years later Leena reached the age at which the laws of her
society demanded that she cover herself from head to toe any time that 
she appear in public.  After that she rarely ventured from her house, 
because she was terrified of what would happen to her if she ever had 
an accident like her aunt.  When she did go out she always wore extra 
coverings, beyond those mandated by law, to make sure that no bit of 
her flesh would ever accidentally see the sun.  But despite those 
precautions, even when she was at home, fear and anxiety of what might 
be done to her for violating the mores of her society plagued her 
incessantly. 

Then her uncle forced Leena to have sex with him, against her will, on
the morning of what might have been either her seventeenth or 
eighteenth birthday.  Afterward he told her that she had committed a 
grave sin by making him do that to her, which had dishonored their 
entire family.  He insisted that the only way to restore that honor 
would be for her to commit suicide, or for her cousins to kill her if 
she refused to do it herself. 

Leena knew of several women who had been the victim of what some people
call 'honor killing', and understood that the government leaders of her 
village would not protect her life but would in fact help the 
perpetrators to get away with murdering her.  When she realized that 
she was in imminent danger she fled from the house.  In her terror she 
forgot to put on her customary covering. 

As the rays of the sun fell upon her uncovered skin it began to absorb
them, and she started to glow.  Her breath quickened and she began to 
feel stronger than she had ever thought possible.  With each passing 
second the intensity of this experience increased, exponentially, until 
that power overcame the force of gravity and lifted her up into the 
air.  Then she realized that she can fly. 

Leena flew past the boarders of her native country, over distant oceans,
and all around the world.  She explored this planet and discovered that 
there are some places where governments profess to have an unwavering 
commitment to protecting the fundamental freedom and legal equality of 
all people, which pleased her very much.  But she quickly became 
disillusioned and very depressed as she learned the disgraceful truth 
that usually hides behind such noble proclamations. 

All of the governments that Leena encountered were like that of her
birthplace, on a very basic level.  All of them claim to have some kind 
of right to restrict each individual's freedom - and to act without 
regard for its personal welfare - in the service of some philosophical 
assertion of what is proper, best, or moral. 

The idea that the actual well-being of individual people is less
important than some ideological concept of righteousness could be said 
to philosophically objectify people, because it reduces people to the 
status of things that may be manipulated, used, and even harmed, 
justly, to satisfy the dictates of that moral code. 

This insidious and very dangerous idea takes many different forms, which
are often violently opposed to some other incarnation of the same basic 
concept, and in one guise or another has infected the minds of most 
human beings in this world.  Many people believe that a government 
built upon one such ideology will abolish all of the human misery 
caused by those people and governments that follow an opposing one, but 
regardless of its specific ideations, or how people try to justify it, 
any philosophy that is rooted in this rude and dehumanizing principle 
will ultimately foster an atmosphere of alienation, antagonism, and 
discord, creating much unhappiness, within any population that is ruled 
by it. 

And once a person welcomes this kind of ideology into its mind it often
starts to think that everyone who does not abide by its chosen idea of 
what is right and respectable deserves to be unhappy in some way, which 
strikes me as the most despicable of all the disgusting and destructive 
beliefs that I have found cluttering human minds.  But I do not think 
that you should have to suffer for holding such a malicious attitude, 
which is fortunate for all of you who perpetrate this hideous thought 
upon the world, because it means that I will still protect you from 
everybody else who thinks the same way and wants to make you miserable 
in retribution for refusing to follow the strictures of their own 
morality. 

As Leena contemplated this concept she came to a country run by a very
powerful government that claims to value the happiness of each 
individual but refuses to do all that is within its power to protect 
and free each person from all that makes it unhappy, which it excuses 
by asserting that a government's proper obligation is merely to protect 
each person's freedom to pursue its own happiness.  And then it 
tramples all over that freedom, as well, by enforcing laws that 
needlessly restrict the things that a person can do to make itself 
happy, while simultaneously making a big, pompous, insincere spectacle 
about how much that country respects personal liberty. 

After leaving that place she flew to another continent, where she
discovered the Democracy.  When Leena saw all of those hypocrites in 
the Democracy who take great pride in the idea that their society 
treats all people with equality but then give their support to laws 
that arbitrarily discriminate against certain groups of people - laws 
that treat people inequitably, in certain situations, based upon 
personal traits that do not have any real relevance to that situation - 
it filled her heart with anger and disgust. 

Then a citizen of the Democracy died from injuries that she sustained
while being arrested, right in front of her young niece, for breaking a 
law that forbade her to wear the same kind of clothing that other laws 
in other lands force people of a certain age and gender to wear. 

Leena considered the existence of these superficially opposite but
equivalently despotic laws, and thought about how the people who take 
the most pride in denouncing one form of oppression are so often the 
most enthusiastic proponents of some other kind.  She thought about how 
those people who fight to free themselves from the tyrannical policies 
of a government that subjugates them rarely seem able - or willing - to 
distinguish that objective from their own desire to then make up new 
laws that subjugate some other segment of the population in a different 
but comparable way.  And she concluded that such obscenely selfish, 
cruel and hurtful idiocy must be inescapably intrinsic to the 
psychological makeup of the human race. 

Then the frustration and resentment kindled in her heart by the
suffocating feelings of fear and anxiety that she had felt ever since 
the death of her aunt burst into a fiery rage.  Anger and bitterness 
consumed her, and at the same time Leena succumbed to the bleak despair 
that this Earth would never know anything but tyranny and misery while 
human beings lived here.  So she decided to scour the planet of its 
human infestation. 

She reached her arms up to the sky, drawing a stream of plasma from the
sun down to her.  As she bathed in the power of that star Leena began 
to glow with a searing intensity, which obliterated everything for 
miles around.  And then she set out to kill the rest of humanity. 

When I saw what she was doing I tried to reach through the blinding,
metaphorical light of her rage to reason with the rational portion of 
her mind, which, I could see, was terrified of her own actions, and was 
truly sorry for all of the innocent lives that she was going to end.  
But that rationality was not strong enough to reign in her angry, 
wounded, hopeless inner-child, who was determined to alleviate her pain 
with these acts of violence. 

Then one of this worlds many presidents commanded some soldiers to drop
a hydrogen bomb on her, which was about as effective as throwing water 
on a fish, because the energy released by the fusion of hydrogen atoms 
into helium is the very thing that gives Leena her power. 

That nuclear blast just increased the intensity of the inferno around
her, and certainly did not diminish her determination to murder the 
human race.  But it did give Leena an idea of how to accomplish that 
task much more efficiently.  She then began forming balls of 
concentrated nuclear energy and tossing them at densely populated areas 
all around the globe, allowing her to destroy lots of people living in 
far off places without any of the inconvenience of having to go to 
those places herself. 

With that new development in her military strategy it seemed certain
that humanity was doomed.  But then I thought of Marcia, for no 
apparent reason, and realized that she just might be able to get 
through to Leena, and help her deal with the trauma of what had been 
done to her, because she had gone through some oddly similar traumas 
herself.  So I asked Bertron to fly me back to Denver, at supersonic 
speed.  Before we took off I asked the incarnation of Hypergirl who was 
there with us to stop the intravenous drug infusion that was keeping 
Marcia unconscious, which was done by the Hypergirl who had remained at 
home. 

When I told her what was going on and asked her to help us stop Leena
from killing everybody Marcia hesitated, and briefly considered the 
possibility of letting us all die.  But then she remembered all of the 
innocent people in this world who do not deserve to die for the 
obnoxious acts of others, and she decided that she would use her power 
to protect us. 

After we landed she formed her bloop into a very dense ball,
interlocking its molecules to create the most stable and resilient 
solid form of this matter.  She sent that orb to Leena, using her 
influence to constantly dissipate its kinetic energy so that it would 
not vaporize.  When the ball reached its destination it began to 
vibrate, creating sound waves that spoke with Marcia's own voice. 

Through that ball of bloop she told Leena that she understood the source
of her anger and relentless pain, and then explained what had been done 
to her.  She said that she regretted the way in which she had reacted 
to that inexcusable and infuriating ill-treatment, because in her anger 
she had lost those parts of herself that she most valued, which are the 
parts of her that feel the happiness that she had once found with her 
dear friend Arthur.  She confessed that her vengeful murders had not 
eased her suffering but only made it worse, and warned Leena that when 
she had exhausted her rage by destroying this entire world she would 
probably regret it too. 

Instead of fueling and increasing her own pain in a futile attempt to
drown it in anger, Marcia suggested, she could simply accept her fury 
and resentment of those people who had hurt her, and then put those 
feelings aside and concentrate on trying to find some remnant of the 
happiness that she had once known, which was still there inside of her, 
though deeply buried.  As she said that I scanned the images of 
Marcia's ordeal from her mind and projected them to Leena, helping her 
to see the truth of what that sagacious little person was telling her. 

Then she realized that being subjected to the bothersome presence of
those who have abused her is a continuation of that abuse, because it 
dredges up the noxious feelings that are connected with their offense 
and violates her desire to be free of those criminals.  But she also 
realized that she did not actually care if they live or die, as long as 
she is rid of them, so she flew off into the sky to find peace and 
solace among the stars. 

In the aftermath of that nuclear holocaust that almost brought about the
extinction of the entire human species, which captured the attention of 
most of the human beings on this planet, those of us who stopped this 
apocalypse became quite famous, on a global scale, which has provided 
me with the opportunity to make this broadcast. 

Today I am using satellite transmissions, rather than the
thought-projector in my head, to communicate simultaneously with more 
than a billion people through this medium that you call television.  
This is a very convenient means of distributing information to many 
people at the same time, but does not enable me to know if that 
information has been received and understood, inconveniently, because I 
cannot see your thoughts through that screen. 

So I do not know if I have successfully conveyed to you the folly of
allowing your planet to be governed by principles that disregard the 
well-being of individual people under the pretense that there are more 
important or righteous concerns, which encourages people to fight 
incessantly, both physically and intellectually, in an attempt to 
control which ideological structures will be used to excuse the 
mistreatment of which people. 

I do not know if I have shown clearly how the traumatic oppression,
insecurity, and unhappiness that is inflicted upon certain people by 
the proponents of such ideologies, starting usually when they are young 
children, often drives these victims to try to appease that misery by 
embracing and clinging to equivalently destructive patterns of thought 
and behavior, turning them into criminals who perpetrate such villainy 
upon the next generation of humanity.  And I do not know if you now 
realize that the best thing that we can do to protect ourselves from 
such people is to break that cycle of institutionalized abuse that 
scars their psyches and motivates them to act that way in the first 
place. 

Instead of supporting social organizations that objectify, subjugate,
and antagonize people with philosophies that disrespect their 
fundamental desire for actual happiness - and by doing so implicitly 
validating the ideological excuses that some people offer for their own 
misguided attempt to satisfy that stifled desire with the same kind of 
abusive behavior - we can aspire to create a world in which each person 
feels protected and safe, free, and as happy as it can possibly be 
without tyrannizing anyone else in any way. 

Then the tragedies of today - and the legally mandated atrocities of
yesterday that inspired them - might never occur again. 

This concludes my broadcast. 

I leave you all to think about this story that I have told, and each to
decide what kind of person you want to be from this moment on.  Will 
you be someone who supports a movement to protect the people of this 
world from all forms of tyranny, so that we can be free to realize our 
full potential for creating happiness?  Will you be an advocate and 
abettor of those criminal institutions that spread misery and conflict 
throughout the world by allowing some people to legally dominate and 
prey upon others?  The choice, as always, is up to you. 

And now back to your regularly scheduled program. 


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