July 27, 2015
By Roxxi Wallace
The future was now.
Borderline Personality Disorder had become the norm. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted had become the new Marilyn Monroe. School shooters were assigned to be our neighbors, just to keep us on our feet. The inmates were running the asylum and all the orderlies could do was blog about it.
We lived in a time where you could achieve stardom by licking a doughnut and saying: “I hate America.” People thought evil men in black were surveying their emails. Beyonce’s vegan diet was more important than ISIS. When ISIS was important, it was only because someone made a meme about it. The media was like a drug that was directly fed into our bloodstream. Everywhere we turned we were being polluted with banal information that served only as an extension of pop culture.
Yet as they told us, the future was now.
What was breaking news had already been forgotten due to its irrelevance. Our memory was overwritten by the newest celebrity pairing, or perhaps some vaguely racist quote from whomever made a good scapegoat. It’s what we were used to, and maybe we even enjoyed it a little. Everyone needed someone to hate.
The people who felt too much? The extra voices in their heads became their religions. The Internet became their church. People would post a status update about mental illness and put their two cents in, even though they had no experience with mental illness. Everyone called them crazy, but that was exactly what they wanted.
We had gone over the borderline.
So fifty years later, the weakest minds of our generation had completely died out. The people who bought into the new media hype were stuck in a virtual reality they could not escape from. Death, it was called. Those of us who were considered the “freaks” and “geeks” of our current time, the people who actively fought against the idiocracy, were the last remaining survivors.
It was the dawn of a new era; where the mentally divergent were now the gatekeepers to ultimate stability. People stopped using sexuality and mental health as accessories. People stopped clicking here to save the world. The future was now, and nobody wanted to be the first to go.
Yet those who had died out were to never return.
The future was now, as they told us.