Tell Stories

Sarah (U.s.a.)

[Writing Experiment]

Once upon a time, there were vast fields of farmers and farm families who worked hard in isolation and toiled so the country and even the greater world could be fed from their produce. These earnest, hard-working people were treated as second-class citizens by people in cities larger than the ones they lived in or near.
Then a great evil with flashy and shiny objects told them they could send their money away and get better and cheaper goods delivered to their door by mail order. And some of the farmers and farm families believed them and forsook their local merchants and sent their money away, and got their goods, and maybe felt better about themselves and their lives because they, too, had shiny objects from a larger city farther away. Then, the local merchants decided that the evil urban merchants must be stopped or they would destroy the world. And they burned mail-order catalogs and they tried to legislate away department stores but none of these tactics worked and people kept sending their money away and getting their goods delivered to their doors.
One day, there were no more local merchants because their businesses had failed, just as some naysayers had predicted, even the liberal, progressive people could never have imagined a world where there were no more local merchants, but sure enough, that is what happened. And the people had to send away for goods, even for basic things they might have bought from the local merchants because they were no longer there.
And the morale of the story is that sometimes, larger economic forces are at play and people get swept up in the drama of daily life and may or may not do as other people tell them to, order or don’t order your goods from away, and then suddenly, decades later, only big box stores exist, and the good people of the land stopped making things because management decided they were too expensive, their labor cost too much, so management sent those jobs to other countries where there were no labor unions or progressive movements and profits were central to stockholders.