Read Gabriel's Horn Page 5

export being… money itself. The King felt sorry to dethrone his father and newly adopted street beggar/son so sometimes he forwarded them some of the sources of his wealth, which he had so far had received no reply from.

  It wasn’t all princesses and butterflies, however, several attempts were made upon the King of Jeremia’s life such as by the notorious

  Little girl with no eyes will kill you if you don’t send this to 20 of your friends.

  Luckily, he had the wisdom to follow the assassin’s instructions and no harm befouled him.

  These days the King spends his days with Queen Candy and being driven around his old companion whom he reemployed. He spends little time with friends as most were killed by little girls with no eyes. Ghastly stuff.

  Soon another disaster struck with the dollar being driven into the ground as international authorities became aware of the massive fraud. The country of Jeremia still survives however with the King’s clever operation of keeping the imports and exports running through secret networks of emails running to 1st world citizens lucky enough to receive one of these opportunities.

  So now that you know the truth, be on the lookout. Remember to check your junk folder. And perhaps you too could become one of the lucky few.

  Charity Is A Big Stinking Scam

  Local man Albert Tony here,

  I’m 42 like most men my age, and I take a great interest in the happenings of the world. Not because I want to bring change or development but just because I like to have a strong opinion on a lot of topics I have no stake in. And it has occurred to me that we are all being afflicted with a terrible disease. This is a disease of the mind and is commonly called charity. Let me explain further; Africans aren’t really human.

  Don’t get all uppity, let’s be honest with ourselves; they couldn’t be.

  Sure the more weak minded members of our community might donate a goat or two to Africa, but in reality, this is nothing compared to our resources. Large portions of the African continent have been destroying themselves through conflict and civil wars and it is clear that the western world has no intention of helping. As one human would help another. They’re not human, and I don’t see any other possible scenario in which our actions as fellow human beings would be rational.

  After all, what do they expect from me, to sell my jacuzzi or my third car? I worked hard to be born white, male, straight and in a first world country. I’m not giving away my piece of the pie so that Timon and Pumba can eat for a week! Maybe at Christmas time we decide to donate and then for the other 364 days we can feel good about ourselves. It’s unfortunate that the starving and impoverished can’t fill up their stomachs for the rest of the year, unlike the western world’s moral conscious.

  It wasn’t always like this, however, this affliction of charity. Somehow the public have been bamboozled by the dirty liberals into this ideology. The filthy lie provided by the 1% of the population who truly care about the unfortunates, who have convinced the 99% hard workers of Australia to donate. There’s a name for this situation, which has a distinct German flavour, I'll give you clue it is where the few rules over the many a.k.a. fascism.

  Enough of those trickster Africans though, and to the more urgent threat of “boat people.” I used to watch cartoons on Saturday morning, my favourite show was transformers or as I used to call it “car people”. But don’t get these Fuzzy Muzzys mixed up with the Autobots, these Arab buggers are more like the Decepticons. Taking our jobs and our women, the Muhammadan robot scum!

  Instead of welcoming them to our beautiful country as our national anthem would suggest (For those who have come across the seas / We’ve boundless plains to share) we put them on Christmas Island and merrily forget about them.

  Are we filming some sort of Survivor show there? I know the ratings usually bomb by the end of the season but this is bringing it to a whole new level. Enough is enough. No more half measures Canberra, only full measures can be used in an invasion such as this.

  We got to bomb the boats, that’ll be a clear message. If they try and sink their own boats or any other dodgy tricks we’ll shoot them right there and then, save them the trouble of drowning.

  Man the fuck up Australia. This situation is much bigger than just Australia however, the entire 1st world is on the fence. We can’t have it both ways, being charitable and completely well off. It is either one or the other, and I say screw Africa.

  SEX, DRUGS, AND CHARITY INDUCED EUPHORIA

  I hear a dial tone in my dreams. Each ring grazes my psyche. These nightmares always end the same, “Hello, I can’t take your call at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep.” Then I wake up and get to work.

  Working at a call centre is hell. ‘It’s just a job’, you’d tell me. Just a job.

  And what is a job but just a way to obtain money? Fuck all the deadbeats who told me through highschool that “money can’t buy happiness.” I’m not saying that I prefer those on the other end of the spectrum, all those sociopathic wall street types always blathering about “Time is money.” Their attitude isn’t entirely wrong, but they’ve got it the wrong way round. Money is time. And for me, it is time spent talking to pensioners about their problems in my depressing cubicle.

  Times have changed for men. I wish was out in the fresh air chopping wood, exercising my body with each swing of the axe under a clear blue sky. In my mind, I can hear a gentle stream and birds singing simply because they enjoy life.

  Then I open my eyes and I’m brought back down into reality. The sound of the gentle stream was just Gareth loudly enjoying his coffee.

  We aren’t volunteers; we’re fundraiser paid on commission to get donations. There is no real work going on here, we produce nothing. I have no axe to swing and there is no need, we humans have technologically ‘advanced’. My fingers are well defined from tapping all day while my back is slowly deforming from sitting at a computer all day.

  It’s not like outside of work is much different. Each night I arrive home exhausted despite doing nothing and eagerly throw myself into the warm hole of Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook. It’s all escapism of course. Same with video games, why go out to the club when I can rescue the princess with no risk to ego and esteem.

  …

  The only purity in my life is the walk to and fro work. As well as being my sole source of vitamin D- it’s in those precious 30 minutes that I feel most alive. I am moving and can feel the world: dirt grass, trees. Not the lifeless plastic of my keyboard and mouse. As I arrive at the centre we start off the shift with a motivating talk. As if I’m meant to feel good that we are fundraising for charity.

  We are worse than the door-to-door salesman, at least with them you get an ‘absolutely amazing’ 16 knife set. With we sell to some poor sap all they end up with is a nice feeling and a tax receipt. That nice feeling wouldn’t last if they found out we took half of their donation.

  I’d like to construct some Robin Hood fantasy, taking from the rich and giving to the poor while in actuality our donors are the poor.

  And the sick.

  And the old.

  The irony isn’t lost on me that the great pay is what attracted me to the charity industry. It’s true- charity is big business- and I can’t speak for the results of our fundraising but I can speak for the people we take our money from.

  It takes a certain type of person to donate:

  First- capacity, having money.

  Secondly- they need to be fragile. Emotionally malleable. This is why our donors most consist of women and the elderly, we pick the bones of society to help those at the bottom. Like advertisements, we create a problem that didn’t exist before in the victim’s mind- some earthquake on another continent, a rare disease. It’s really irrelevant what it is. Not only do we try to pull their heartstrings, we tune their heartstrings and then strum a heartbreaking song on them.

  We just a need something to band the masses against. For the Nazi’s it was the Jews, but the terrifying thing is that it cou
ld have been anyone. Modern society doesn’t understand the truly terrifying nature of the Third Reich was in it’s constantly morphing moral ambiguity. The tragic history of the Jews is nothing to dismiss. However, the horror of the holocaust resides in the sheer heartless practicality of Hitler’s takeover.

  In the same way, we fundraisers persuade the minds and hearts of own prospects/prey. We are admittedly, the lesser of the two evils, in that we manipulate people to act out of love and compassion – as opposed to hatred and indifference. However, it is equally manipulative and underhand.

  I wonder if humankind will always be at the whim of the man at the speakerphone. There is a scene that comes to mind from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’, just after the famous speech which the film is mostly known for. Just after delivering his inspirational speech he strangely takes of a face of pure hopeless as the crowd wildly cheers. This is not explained explicitly however I am drawn to the theory that Chaplin is horrified at the crowd cheering in equal fervour as they did just previously for Hitler’s ideas.

  It is this same cosmic eternal horror that I constantly find myself in. Our office's own ideology is split between two major schools of thought. On one hand, we’re encouraged to feel happy that we are doing this for charity and are simultaneously bombarded with salesman propaganda (Always be closing,