Redemption Town

(Jacob Freeze asked what of inherent greed in my essay, If Not Us – Who? Redefining Power yesterday. This parable is the result)

Our town used to be called Shit Town back during the fruit wars, which were never really about fruit, but the greego mentality. We renamed it Redemption.

Greegos, is what we call the Apple people now, you know, they have that greed/ego gene that made it impossible to fit into a new society built on love.

It started with little things, like the idea that apples and oranges don’t mix. I asked one apple peddler why he only hung out with other apple people in the beginning. “Hey, I have an orange grower living next door to me, I’m no fruitist!” I asked if they ever had a beer together, or if their families ever barbecued a meal on a weekend to share. “No, but I say hi to him all the time on garbage day at the curb,” he answered like that was a badge of honor or something.  I told him he should. He stuttered and laughed a nervous forced “Ha,” and said something about not having anything in common and it would be too weird.

By the end? I learned something. We all learned something. I will never trust an apple again, ever. They just aren’t like you and me. Oh, we kept the fruit, we just exiled the greegos.

I don’t know what it was about the apple people, I mean the grape growers had all those ancient vines, everyone one of them could trace their lineage back to Earls or Dutchesses at first. But once they came to our town, they ended up assimilating pretty well. I mean, what good a title when you’re pushing a shopping cart down the lane to trade, right? Besides, their very nature was always about a good wine or ale anyway.

We soon learned a few things about apples. They were obsessed with tricky trades, stockpiling for themselves more like the money-traders of the old society. They were obsessed with notoriety too, always trying to edge everyone out and grab the spotlight. They soon started to become clannish. In Redemption, no one is allowed to exclude anyone else, but what good stopping at an apple event if no one would deign to talk to you? And man… how different they treated you if your last name was “Fuji,” “Golden” or “Gala.” Names became code-words for better trades. One guy was obsessed with his “Redelicious” name so much, he thought it made him kin to the Gods. “The two most beautiful words in the world,” he would proclaim, “are Red and Delicious!” That was a perfect example of the ego part of the greed/ego “greego” gene.

The greegos weren’t only the apple peddlers, some of the other traders were stuck on trying to bring the so-called “old world” with them. They began banding together in little enclaves, their unfair trades making them able to push others out of the prime real estate. They began to treat the old stories almost like a religion, a religion that only they could understand. They even began telling them in the old language, a language we agreed to abandon when we started the new society – a society created on sharing and inclusion.

No matter how many interventions we tried, how many meetings, the people couldn’t seem to break them of their attachment to greed or ego. There was a huge apple-sized whole in their psyches that made them unable to see how exclusionary, how exceptionalist their Apple settlements were, held as separate in the middle of what was then “Shit Town.”  They began to eschew community meetings, and held their own, occasionally popping into town during a particularly bad winter, and ceremoniously dumping apples in the square, HOARDED apples that should have belonged to everyone in the first place…. then expected everyone to be grateful for their huge donation, with no sense of guilt or irony, as Joe pointed out. They saw it as proof positive they were good community members.

That’s what started the rumbling of the people, but it is not what started the fruit revolution.

The final straw was the breaking of the First Rule.

The first and foremost rule in our society was simple. “Help, always.”

If someone was wounded, you helped, if someone was sick, you helped, if someone was hungry, you helped. It was a rule of the dire, a dire wrought by the previous society – when so many were left alone and ignored while the world burned around them. Human beings never turned their back on suffering any more. Rule One.

It was early evening, and a group of Apples were off to one of their endless meetings about all things Apple and Apple-story, when a young boy crashed his bicycle. It was a compound fracture, the bone sticking out of his leg, blood everywhere.

One by one, they turned their heads, and did the unthinkable. Pretended not to see, pretended not to hear his screams of agony, and darted quickly behind the gates that lead to their fancy new Appleporium. They were too “busy.” They thought themselves too “important.” They figured, let someone else do it.

Luckily, a banana man saw through his window, and ran to aid the boy, or he surely would have died from femoral blood loss. The banana man bore witness to the whole episode, backing the boy’s tale at the trial.

The Apples then cordoned off their neighborhoods, doing the unimaginable: using arms meant only to protect the People against the very People they were sworn to be part of in the new society.

Negotiations went as expected. The Apples tried to explain how much they contributed to society, with their winter donations, their superior intellect, their culture. They said, “Look at how we restored that old building and made it into the luxurious Appleporium!” never even realizing that it was built off hoarded fruits, that it was shut off from the people it was supposed to belong to.

It came to pass that we just surrounded them and starved them off. You cannot eat the old language, and hoarded Apples rot eventually. They would smell the roasting chickens, and try and raid the other’s stores.

There was no room for greed and ego in the new world.

By spring? It was easy to round them up and send them into exile.

Greegos don’t belong here.

For a while, you could hear them outside the walls, begging for redemption, but the scouts watching saw it all. They were still fighting amongst themselves about who would be the Leader, they were stealing from one another, rather than sharing.

We wanted the opposite of the violent Cro Magnons beating out the peaceful Neanderthal’s. We wanted it not to matter what you looked like, what your name was, or what you grew. Our children learn to share, saying “Don’t be an Apple, and for god’s sakes don’t let your ego go all redelicous on you!” The very worst insult you will ever hear here now? “Greego go home!”

Its like there truly must be the metaphorical greego gene, like its in their very blood.

Is there Redemption for that type?

I don’t know, but when we changed the name of the Town to Redemption, we were hoping so.

But Apples don’t fall far from the trees.

Now we call the fruit “redemption” too, and everyone can have a bite of it to share, any time they want.

That’s the only way it can work.