E Pluribus Unum = Socialism

I sometimes think I use the word "fuck" too often, but these are fuckingly terrible fucked-up times so I think it's fucking Sapporo. So fuck it!

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One day, in a not-too-alternate universe, engineers invented the steam locomotive. And the people cheered. Food and consumer goods were now able to be delivered in record time across vast distances.

And the men who ran the railroads became absurdly wealthy.

One day these railroad tycoons said to themselves, "Think how much better these locomotives would work if they were the size of apartment buildings."

So the tycoons had their engineers create and build giant locomotives, so immense that they blocked the view of the horizon. And because these tycoons were in competition with one another they each began having them built by the thousands.

The people who relied on the railroads were confused as the old locomotives were doing their job properly enough to suit their needs. But their confusion was as nothing compared to their anger when they noticed the giant trains were using so much coal that the people could no longer warm their homes or cook their food.

Even worse, the smoke from the giant locomotives blotted out the sun and the crops began to fail. And the heat from the burning coal raised the temperature of the atmosphere so much that it caused a drought. And the people suffered. But the tycoons didn't care and they kept building more locomotives.

One day all the coal was gone. Which was just as well as there was no food to go to market or consumer goods for the stores, so the giant locomotives sat silent and began to rust away. And the people died.

It's said that somewhere, among the billions of skulls dotting this dusty planet, there were a handful that looked upon the rusting hulks of the steam engines, and their fixed grins seemed to be just a little more smugly self-satisfied than all the rest.

The end.

(This is just a work of fiction. Some say a metaphor, some say an allegory, but no reasonable civilization would be foolish enough to destroy itself this way.)

-Lefty