A Tale of Two Cities
The city of Excessinon was once a shining grand city in the far away land of Squalum. The city was very independent and self-sufficient; and most of the people who lived there were well off and enjoyed a remarkable quality of life. However, a problem arose: The ground under the city from which the residents pumped their water was running dry. There was only one solution, and that was to pipe their water from the distant city of Exploitinon. Exploitinon lied across an open desert and was very difficult to get to, but the city of Excessinon was determined. Not only was an aqueduct constructed across the wasteland, but a nice highway as well. You see, the residents of Excessinon realized that they could not continually send their money to Exploitinon to pay for the water without a system of trade set up, which the new highway would provide.
Things seemed to be going well at first, but problems arose. The city of Exploitinon was a poor city, and most of the revenue collected from the sale of water was being embezzled by a handful of individuals. The embezzlers acquired grand palaces while most of the people of Exploitinon remained in destitution, dealing with the ever-substandard city infrastructure and services. The unrest in Exploitinon would occasionally make the news headlines back in Excessinon, but no one paid much attention until the oligarchs that controlled the water in Ex-p decided one day to raise their price. The mayor of Ex-c, Mr. McNut, raised his voice to the residents and proclaimed, “Piping our water from Exploitinon is a serious problem; we must find another source.” The mayor’s proclamation did not fall on completely deaf ears—some action was taken—but his warning would eventually be all but forgotten. The oligarchs backed off for the time being, but the problem remained.
Mayor McNut was voted out of office for his negativity and replaced by the charismatic Mr. Opto Mystic. Mayor Mystic represented a different crowd. He represented an opportunistic group that included among others, water vendors and those that desired to exploit the poor of Ex-p, who were willing and able to work for much less than those in Ex-c. The election of Mayor Mystic also propelled the opportunists, many of whom were incredibly wealthy, to a new level of control over the government of Ex-c, and therefore the people, a control which would only strengthen as time went by.
Time passed and despite promises to the contrary, the highway between Ex-p and Ex-c only resulted in more money flowing out of Ex-c than was flowing in. Mayor Mystic had told the people not to worry about water and to use all they wanted, and they did just that. More lanes were added to the highway, and a trade deficit began to grow between the two cities. Jobs began to migrate to Ex-p. To compound the city’s problems, the population began growing older; young couples were having less children. As the trade gap widened, the only way to legitimately bring the money back into Ex-c was to borrow it from Ex-p. A black cloud of debt began to form over the city. Some of the opportunists, attempting to keep the staus quo, began letting the people of Ex-p migrate to Ex-c at an increasing pace. Some of the opportunists knew that the things they were doing would be detrimental to Ex-c in the long run; some did not care. Others were in denial, kidding themselves that everything would work out in the end. Still others were simply caught up in the deregulatory tide, and had to join the frenzy in order to compete. The rich opportunists often used their money to influence the people through repetative dogma, including repeatedly telling the people of Ex-c how the job loss was to their benefit. And as the city and the government weakened, the opportunists only gained more control, and almost always got their way. Many of the local leaders had no choice; they had to do what the opportunists wanted or face losing jobs in their neighborhood. Others were just greedy and took the money the opportunists offered them for favors, (if they did not fall into the category of being one of the opportunists themselves).
Then one day, a group of the city’s smartest individuals said they had discovered an aquifer under the city that had the potential for supplying eight times more water to the city then what fell on the city as rain. The water was also much, much cleaner then than the water they were piping from Ex-p. The only problem was, it was below a layer of incredibly hard rock, and getting to it was just a matter of devoting enough resources and technology.
In the end, the opportunists tried desperately to keep the status quo. By many different avenues, they had succeeded in creating a climate that served to make themselves richer, while some of those same avenues managed to sustain the economy of Ex-c with an ever increasing burden of personal debt upon the working and middle class—until the bottom began to fall out. They told the people that they were lazy and needed to work harder. They told them they were not religious enough and to force others to conform. They told the people they must have more children and overpopulate. They even tried to force the people to give them every cent of their savings and retirement. They did everything in their power to distract the people of Ex-c from their biggest problems and solutions, and it worked. Because Ex-c was a democratic society, enough people followed the opportunists until it was simply too late. The super wells never got dug. Like a runaway train, jobs began to disappear from Ex-c at an almost exponential pace. The price of water skyrocketed. Large sums of cash were removed from the city's economy and never returned. The black cloud of debt turned into a raging storm. Unable to regulate its borders and trade, the once resplendent city of Excessinon fell into a state of rapid decline.
The city of Excessinon never disappeared entirely though; it simply lost its unique qualities. The two cities eventually arrived at a state of complete homogeneity. And if it wasn’t for the signs along the highway on the way in to each town, a person would probably not be able to tell which city he was in.
The End