The war of words escalated, pushing and shoving people from one group to another, as miniwaves of popularity crashed upon the shore of cultural obscurity.
One day, the Entitlementists aligned with the Ruralites.
The next day, the Ruralites aligned with the Provisionists.
The Urbanskis didn’t care, as long as the tired, the hungry and the poor could be recruited from foreign shores and hired to serve as underpaid maids, servants, sweatshop factory workers and baristas moonlighting as actors/writers/barristers.
The troops hidden in everyday life — lone wolves, pistol-packin’ mamas, disrespected war veterans — waited for the signal.
Was the pending death of the country’s leader the red flag of war they needed?
What about the death and illness of other leaders?
How about the injury of a favourite athlete on the field of play? Forced to retire early, would the athlete lead the charge?
The signal, as history tells us, was actually a small series of events — some big, some largely forgotten — that forced the people to give up their comfortable couch potato lives and destroy the old ways that ate holes in the moral fabric of modern life.
A family traveling home from a holiday visit to in-laws pulled off the side of the road due to a flat tyre on their caravan.
A lorry driver, his eyes off the road, typed a text message of undying love and devotion. Glancing up, he saw the caravan and swerved at the last second, avoiding a collision but accidentally sending the text message and picture of his naked self to his wife instead of his port-of-call girlfriend.
The wife, confused about the text message, called her casual sex girlfriend and told her their bicurious relationship was over because the wife’s husband was coming home and he had the hots for his wife once again.
The girlfriend, upset about the sudden breakup, told her brother that the world sucked and she planned to kill herself unless he gave her a good reason.
The brother, looking for a reason to use his new secret code, ultrawideband radio to trigger his Orange Tang Clan to start a war with their rivals, the Extreme Congestion Zicam Webcam Gang, told his sister to grab her ammo clips, Bushmasters and case of Busch beer — they were going to shoot some mofos and end a rivalry for good.
The sister stopped by a local liquor store to buy the beer but found they were out of Busch — the store had PBR, Old Milwaukee and a special on Popcorn Sutton XXX moonshine.
She met her brother and his clan members at an abandoned carpark. They drank the beer and the moonshine, hooted and hollered, cheered and jeered and generally made a lot of noise out of range of the Webcam Gang.
Drunk, inebriated, schlossed, they drove toward their destination, missing a few turns, running over a few old ladies walking their dogs, shooting some homeless people and specifically raising an alarm that something was amiss if not afoot.
Suddenly finding themselves chased by a couple of police cruisers, the Orange Tang Clan crashed into velvet ropes in front of a museum where a black tie affair was held in honour of a civil rights leader.
The police officers called in to headquarters the situation, over the noise of a jazz band and machine gun fire, that the Klan was attacking a Martin Luther King, Jr, party.
The dispatchers who received the call quickly texted their friends that a race riot was underway downtown.
Meanwhile, the children sat bored in their caravan, their father trying to read the tiny text on his smartphone about how to change a tyre and their mother screaming that she was tired, had a headache and wondered why her husband couldn’t just call the roadside assistance company that they too much every year to provide service for a night like this.
Bloggers picked up the retexted messages from the dispatchers and announced that global riots had begun in the early part of 2013, as had been predicted by a group of people who claimed they had properly decoded the Mayan calendar which said that within a month of 21 Dec 2012, the world economy would collapse as the global society attacked itself from within.
The kids in the caravan read the rerererererererererereinterpreted text message in posts by their friends, saying that it looked like a gender war had broken out, whatever that meant.
The mother opened the glovebox, pulled out a handgun and shot the father, then shot herself.
The kids, knowing their father kept a survivalist kit hidden in the compartment where the spare tyre was supposed to be, pulled out the kit, loaded the weapons and took off into the woods, familiar with the layout of the land because it was on the edge of the camp they spent their summers.
The lorry driver had a heart attack and crashed into a petrol station, setting it on fire and causing a massive explosion, which confirmed the fears of people in the neighbourhood glued to their tellies which broadcast images of riots breaking out around the world. The neighbours quickly confirmed who was with and who was against each other and build barricades in the streets.
Fathers, sons and brothers, mothers, daughters and sisters fought hand-to-hand and hand-in-hand as the riots escalated.
Local, state and national military/militia units were put into action but, as members of the armed forces found out their family members were attacking each other, refused to obey commands, turning vehicles and planes toward their homes in vain attempts to save their own.
Politicians, unable to find their spokespeople or speechwriters, made personal appeals directly to their constituents for calm, fearing their reelection finance funds would become worthless, forcing them to get real jobs that required a person to work and lose their fantasies that the simple, workfree sounds of their own voices had a powerful sway over others.
Signals are not always what they seem or were planned to be.
Sometimes, the technologically elite miss the boat when mobs use the old-fashioned sneaker net, mixed with a little grain alcohol, to motivate themselves into action.
That, my friends, is how the Velvet Rope Revolution was started — a flat tyre.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to know that historians have raked the record books looking for the cause of that flat tyre.
The thick, hardened thorn of a single rosebud, perhaps?
treetrunkdings 