Turkana IV in the News--Again

Posted on Tue 25th May, 2021 @ 6:01am by Lieutenant Damion Ildaran

477 words; about a 2 minute read

Hm. Apparently, the murder of that teenage girl in Anndaic Village a year ago has sparked a revolution of sorts. A group of women have formed their own gang in a town near Anndaic and are making life unpleasant for the rival factions there. Good on them.

I remember how furious I was last year when I read the original story. I wondered what, after decades of indifference, suddenly induced a great lot of women to care enough about the death of one girl to finally do something about it. What set off the spark? In my anger at the injustice of it--this Nissaa Zin was simply the most recent of many and likely has not been the last--I finally knocked some sense into myself. I'm not going home anytime soon. I've made it not my problem. I can only hope some good will come of this, eventually. I'd like to see some lasting improvement take place in the lives of my folk--everywhere, not just in Anndaic.

I'm uneasy and am not holding my breath, though. When all you've ever known has been one awful way of life, that does not prepare you well for living better than that. Generally, it just makes you accept the awful way as normal. It took me years to stop thinking like someone from Turkana IV thinks, and I'm not entirely certain I've lost all those ways of thought. I try. When I first came to the Federation, I watched how other people behaved around each other. It was the only guide I had, as I couldn't read well enough to have opened a book. The little things I noticed were staggering. The way people on Earth would make jokes that were not at someone else's expense; the sharing of--anything: work, food, whatever. Earth was not a place where every person acted only for their own benefit. It took me months to understand the concept of generosity and to see it as a good thing, not a stupid thing. Bizarre. Now I do it as naturally as breathing.

Maybe that's only because the Federation is a society of abundance. If things were scarcer, might we all devolve into the every-man-for-himself jungle that is my homeworld? Exactly how far removed from scavengers are we? I'm not sure I'd want to find out. The veneer might be quite thin.

Strange paths my thoughts are taking tonight. I didn't eat dinner with Elizabeth this evening because I needed to prune my plants back, and I'm beginning the studies for Analyst School. I told Grax I still wanted to do that. So it's going to be SCIS by day, Analyst School by night. If the lads from back home could see me now, they wouldn't believe it.

 

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