Illinoir

But now, here it was again. A cicada invasion was once again the talk of the town. It was all anybody could think of. The conversation rankled me; nobody would listen to reason.
“I’ve been through this before,” I said, for what must have been the hundredth time that month. “It’s all a bunch of hype and fear mongering. They need to keep us scared of something, so they’re latching onto this.”
“Who’s they?” Therese asked.
“You know,” I said. “They. Them.”
“Who?”
I sighed, looked to Paul for help. He just shrugged. As my best friend in the bunch, the only civilized person amongst the savages of central Jersey, I often needed backup from him. He was usually quick to come to my aid, but sometimes he seemed to derive a sort of sick pleasure from watching me twist in the wind.
I turned back to Therese. “They are the government, the news media, the entertainment industry. Gun control nuts. Red state extremists. Fucking…fucking McDonald’s and PepsiCo.” I was on a roll, reaching for straws perhaps, but on a roll nonetheless. Once I got started it was hard to stop. “Think of everyone that benefits when we’re kept afraid. Docile. Timid and meek inside our houses, too scared to come outside, much less to question a government edict that makes it legal to drag citizens out of bed in the middle of the night to question them without counsel present, to hold them indefinitely without charges, to make people disappear, erase them from the public record as if they had never existed. Think about how quickly emergency acts get passed. And look at all the revenue being generated. All the advertising dollars. All the protective gear being sold.”
Sharon took her eyes off of Paul for a second and cast a dark but amused gaze in my direction. “Do you really believe all the things that you say?” she asked.
“Of course I do,” I said. “If you can’t recognize a vast, global governmental conspiracy underwritten by Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay and executed by CNN and Comedy Central when the proof is right there before your very eyes, then can you claim to be paying attention to what’s going on around you?”
Sharon rolled her eyes at me — something she did with frightening regularity. It was okay: I was used to it, and tended to return the gesture with similar frequency.