"You can't really

  take both sides." 

  "I disagree." 

  The fired-up, feuding groups in front of the statue did not quiet as the two people began a conversation that would last a lifetime and revolutionize thinking.  

  Both were out of work, out of school, out of favor.  Not without dignity, not without discipline, and not without the kind of experience in the world that forces people to have insight. 

  "It's not really about winning this argument." 

  "Or getting the most people on my side!" 

  They set about inviting people into a rented room for discussion.

The heel slid in the viscous

  covering the Right to Life poster on a stick.  "When we get there," the woman said to the phone.  People asked a few more questions about the re-arranging of the SAFETY lines of communication in emergency, and ticked off answered questions about insurance stuff after a hurricane.  The husband hadn't eaten and was feeling faint.  "Any more questions?" She asked everyone.  A long-winded question, two-part came from the back of the group gathered.  "That I would have to check with my superior on," some coo'd and ah'd at her graceful acknowledgment of having a superior.  She eyed the standoffish other party quorum.  "You know?!  You could just ask anyone of them since they are the party of God." 

  "Honey, we need to go," the husband called from the towncar. 

  Two Jews dove behind a folding table. 

  "Where did that come from?" A script-reader asked out loud and moved to have the gaff un-recorded.  Videographers snapped off cameras and packed up to leave. 

"Hi Mom,"

  Whoosh, whoosh, spitting out the spray of salt and sand and ice pellets.  "Is this a bad time?" 

  "No, not really." Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.  "Aunt whooshchuggrindfoof-foof-foof wants to know where you are.  Always welcome in Arizona is the message." Truck gear parts splayed out on the road.  "Okay, I'll explain it.  Right now I'm shackled in a plywood box on a mountain pass in Utah." 

  "I'm sure those around you appreciate your dramatic flair." 

  "Remember my friends in NC who were gearing up to do the trucking show?" 

  "Well, I met a lot of people honey," 

  "Anyway, one of them is going to do a new show!" 

  "Pass those up there!" The Senior Correspondent on scene pointed to some antennae and up at the plywood box attached to a highway sign over the road.  "Well, I gotta go Mom.  There's food supply finally sprung from port strike and a bit of a convoy coming after they clear this direction of illegal drugs!" 

  "Never a dull moment.  I bubble you.  Lots of Rosary prayers." 

  "Love you." Phone given down and into waterproof bag.

"The baton was a bloody mess."

  The man had been video-documenting four days straight.  He crumpled.  The woman crawled past the few objects flying off a plywood table shaking this way and that.  Removed the heavy PRESS vest from the crumpled man who was yelping as the mortar rounds sailed in and pocked the area. 

  "PUT IT ON." 

  A slide on hands and knees through blood to a low-lying cot.  The hands that would not let go of the baton.  A bloody tug-of-war. 

  "It was this or that, down the line in corp." 

  "It seems it's all the same now." 

  "I haven't warn a suit since that day." 

  That day.  "He's lost his mind," top execs announced to security.  "Don't put your hands on me," he told them.  Then he spit on the flat turf-carpeting in the hallway like he was still at the farm.  Everybody stalled everybody until another guy came out.  We'd done it too.  One way or another botched the precision strike simulator test. 

  "It doesn't have to be this way," a young millie tried to explain. 

  Just skin and bones face stretched mouth to reveal really long teeth as an almost visible toxic cloud came from the man.  "It would help you out there." The "thing" comes with its own luggage.  Set up anywhere and strike away.  "That's beyond callous."  

  "Let me tell you something.  The enemy gets into cubicles and orb-armchairs and does the same fucking thing.  Like video games." 

  "We're not interested," said our little team's lead.  "We'll get our news the hard way." 

  "If I have to say that one more time, I am going to scream."  

  "Don't do that." 

  "She brought them here!" 

  An eye roll. 

  "He's putting it back." The search lights were not surplus.  They'd been borrowed by a conservancy group aiming to help preserve Broadway.  Muffled by curtains voices bickered up and down the squatting and sitting line of communicators. 

  "And whoooo is this?" 

  "He's my uncle." 

  "Oh sure, everybody's got an uncle." 

  "His field got merged into Culture when the federal system went private company/slash/generic.  Made us all more like the property of a Ministry, m'am." 

  "I see."  Voices quieted and people pinched and punched the person on either side of them.  She had to say it again.  "I haven't met any Muslims here in this city.  So I'm going back Overseas where I feel more comfortable." The five people taking the statement from the International body scanned, photographed, made the woman stick her tongue out, and checked all numbers on IDs and credit cards against the master world databank.  Then left.

  In truth the residents of the City were being held hostage to swarms.  Hence, occasional spotlighting of courtyards and alleyways and plazas and station platforms allowed stillshot photography of such--being swarmed. 

  "And why should I select this sweaty, sweaty man to give a calm and cool presentation?" 

  "I'm sorry, I, I," the Accountant let his had-been-in-a-Dentist's-chair groggy head drop into his hands.  "She loathes uncleanliness." 

  "Get him the thermos of black coffee." The order was heard down the line and the thermos was produced and passed forward.  "WHY????" 

  "It has to do with," 

  "Lift your helmet up.  Chin out.  And look me in the eyes." A medical flashlight checked pupils.  "Has to do with what?" 

  "I can't be definite on political party but let's just say, a bunch of people, with buying power," a sip of black coffee, "Had to or not had to, but stepped up and bought a whole bunch of stuff being sold on the freemarket." 

  "What kind of stuff?" 

  "Weapons and GPS and"

  "And what does this man," the man looked up and grinned, "Have to teach us?" The Correspondent looked at what had been written of a Bio thus far.  "Says here he's a Lutheran." 

  "Christ." 

  "And he invented 

  "Not really invented 

  "Developed the working concept of Forensic Accounting." The man swallowed hard and started to choke.  The people crouched near him slugged and whapped him on the back.  "Fine, I'm fa FINE," he stifled more coughing. 

"How was,"

  the young man held out a hand with the ink-scrawled place name on it and tried to pronounce it smoothly in asking the question.  "Clear the doorway, clear the doorway," a Beret advised.  

  People with cuts, bruisings, and other implement wounds staggered and dashed from every direction of the neighborhood.  Shovel fight, someone reported to the clipboard.  Hit with, hit on the head with an iron that holds open a door.  A medical person held out a pencil-shaped flashlight.  A person took it and checked eyes in a bathroom mirror. 

  Take them off, take them off a woman who'd had back surgery who'd been nearly stampeded and then couldn't walk pointed at the tee-shirts that said peace and tie-dyed the symbol of peace.  Water in a basin, bloody. 

  A crew had shown up at a family's house to film an Ad.  The peace plants had been overturned in their garden bed.  Armed gunmen responding to a local paper advertisement for Landscapers needed.  The older lady had been briefly held in a threatened way but hadn't caved to knowing the military neighbors.

  People had stormed out of a General Community Meeting when the American national anthem was played.  A kid had been forced to raise a spray-painted black piece of bed sheet.  "That's not our flag," a previously sullen older Veteran said over the speaker playing the anthem.  "What does it mean?" A woman caring for him asked. 

  "So," eyes swirling around the room but not focusing, "Fallujah never happened?" 

  "Not as a decisive battle, no son."  The young man pulled at the tuft of hair on his head trying to comprehend.  He got an aha! look.  "Oooooh, somebody thinks it's just ongoing forever like this from now on!?!" 

  "It can't be.  They've limited weapons." 

  "But not supply." 

  "And look at these new shipping lanes per them melting the ice." The scientists relayed to the group.

"A barrel bomb"

  had been intimated by someone far from a zone.  People who'd been raised through schools to specialize in one sector or another, like finance or culture paled. 

  On the monitors people going about their daylight hours not directly under the blast just collapsed. 

  Commanders conferred.  Suddenly they realized together and separately why some Gulf States had redirected material to a certain realm's leader.  With many accounting sheets zero-balanced and fewer and fewer people able to just put it on the credit card 

  People cried.

Back up in the norths...

  "This one'll need an advocate." The woman allowed to flip through one of dozens of binders of mugshots in an Executive Administrator's guest chair announced of the little person being processed.  An assistant wrote the ID number on a memo and stuck it on her arm.  "Coming through, coming through," said with what voice left.  Moved through a sea of heavy coat'd grown ups. 

  A phone call. 

  An order, "Take it outside." 

  Outside.  "Well we can't just not sell papers.  Lemme think.  Lemme think."  Snowfall on broad shoulders of a skeletal man.  "Run a Best Of."  The man hung up.  "At least the locals will pay to put themselves on their walls.  "If they win."

"I would say," a lawyer asked a lawyer

  if it was okay to express an opinion before getting an approval to "only talk about the food" to a gaggle of interested parties outside the detention center.  "I didn't eat the sample serving.  I couldn't." 

  "Can you describe what it looked like?" 

  "Some powder thrown on dirty water macaronis." 

  A hand in front of the person's face and a loud-into-the-microphones, We're done here.

"Are you going to file anything?"

  In the generic cubicle space even sound is suppressed.  

  A generically stamp-patched personnel uniform locked the door of a close-by room where a male colleague had been taken. 

  "Doesn't look like anybody whose been in this place has.  So I guess I'll pass." 

  Over long hours of doing nothing others were deposited in the shelter.  

  "Imagine." Someone said with all the loaded in that word.  "How Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms, said he could rule over all of them." A person groaned, "You would take it there." 

  "Is that what it's about?" 

  Always, came out of the dark.  It had been a last group decision to keep the lights on or turn them off.  We voted each time a "new person" joined. 

  "Said it was the only way 

  "There's rarely an only way 

  "Now imagine the opposite.  Imagine Jesus showing a man all the kingdoms he could rule

  "Or imagine Jesus showing Satan." 

  "To bypass," a long drag on an inhaler, "Nothing possible besides fighting on," a tiny hold of breath and a hand gesture offering of the object, "TWO STATE SOLUTION." 

  "YAH, now nobody can afford to be on that kind of Board." 

  "Good news is, it's all over." 

  "Bad news?" 

  "It's all more of a military thing now." 

  "All of it?" 

  "Even culture." 

"Of course it does," an

  Impact Zone person started by answering a frantic question from a young person, "Does global order change?"  

  This was back when the Soviet Union was weakening and coming apart.  Geopolitical entities can and do change.  And so relationships change. 

  "Changes happen because of natural disasters, wars, epudemics, drugs," the man looked down and just briefly far away.  Grief.

  "What should we talk first?" The world leader who'd managed to survive "a purge" of existing establishment, spoke.  It seemed like a "miracle" to a lot of people.  People who'd walked side by side people trying to survive a lot of change.

"You KITties coming up with

  a comprehensive summary?" An Executive asked. 

  A middle-ager not anything by association had done an "awake overnight" to quick-read a bunch of stuff.  "Well, history does show that the team touched on all the key points about an economical picture." 

  "And we don't seek to erase 

  "Or revise 

  "Our 

  "World 

  "history," they'd finished the sentencing together.  Another young person let a binderfull of paperwork crash to the floor.  Bitterly frustrated, someone mouthed.  "Perfect.  You're all just perfect.  To the point of finishing each other's sentences and," stood up, nobody flinch, flipped a tie up off a breast, "So matchy-matchy." 

  "Point is," the little like-minded knot in the stream of just talking kept on, "Even in the Revolutionary War days there was a not-greatly-publicized separation of powers before 

  "Different unifications as the battles happened." 

  "Wouldn't that have left people, sometimes, feeling very lonely?" The frustrated person asked.  "Come sit," said the middle-ager.  "Make room," said people who'd been forging skills at steely boundaries.  "And isolated," the middle-ager said holding up a Blackberry like the one the frustrated person had turned to grab before joining the talks.