I’m very excited that my novella, “Please Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed,” is featured in Running Wild Novella Anthology Vol. IV, Book 1. I started writing this story while I was writing my dissertation and the amount of bureaucratic nonsense I had to deal with was derailing my efforts to finish. The constant deadlines, interruptions, requirements, and plain-old nonsense was driving me crazy and I vented my frustration on a poor guy living in a future version of Woonsocket, Rhode Island name Carlos. Carlos’s life is controlled by “legal” requirements that perpetually disadvantage him.

To write the story, I looked at current trends – education costs, job availability, debt – and the ways our loose concepts of consumer and citizen protections create so many opportunities to be victimized for profit. I’ll touch on an example. While it horrifies me that, in the United States, we rely on for-profit, employer-provided healthcare as a form of blackmail. Work, or suffer physically. Work, or die. However, there are so many pro-insurance, pro-hospital loopholes, that even people who work and obtain “good” insurance must be repeated victimized in the process of gaining the benefits they pay for. The idea that we have “choices” that countries with “socialized” medicine don’t have is true – we can choose to eat or buy medicine, we can choose to pay medical bills or for our children’s educations, we can choose to go to the hospital or doctor our insurance tells us we can go to instead of someone we trust. When usury and debt control a population, choice is a cruel joke.

In my story, none of this has changed. The US is even more usury based than it is currently. It hurt me to imagine that, but it’s possible. In fact, we continue to become more obscenely usurious all the time.

The point is that if we allow ourselves to be interpolated as consumers and producers our whole lives – rather than citizens and human beings – nothing will change. In fact, the longer we wait to acknowledge and address that the United States society is fully defined by usury, the more deeply entrenched the usury becomes. The less likely we are to survive it. The more complicit we all become in the suffering it causes to those who can’t fight back and those who do fight, and pay for it.

I hope you will read “Please Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed” and reflect on the ways we give up freedom to become consumers. When do we begin exploring option to deal with usury, both legal and through economic civil disobedience?

You can purchase the novella here – https://www.amazon.com/Running-Wild-Novella-Anthology-Book-ebook/dp/B08R7XJ7C1

Thanks to Frankie Rollins, Sandra Shattuck, and, of course, Erin Aldrich, for this help with this story!