Picture a camera panning across a room in the middle of the night. A room with a corner lighted by the glow of a computer screen burning long into the ungodly hours, but otherwise dark. Picture a woman poring over the keys, frantically composing the latest in a long string of materials that influence a hefty portion of the thinking population – cigarette smoke announcing her proximity before her lips, pursed in determination, come into the frame. In the camera eye she looks absolutely vigilant, resembling an unyielding angel staunchly defending the last battlefield over which the war between good and evil is to be decided. Gaze upon Cecilia the journalist, the underground sensation, the avenger of democracy, and the most celebrated woman in the Society of Free Thinking (henceforth referred to as “the SOFT”).

“A hundred days ago, a new president took oaths to serve the people,” she writes. “His term has been so far just that, a century egg – different looking, sufficiently transparent. And more importantly, of foul taste to some, but exquisite to others.” So she begins, in what will undoubtedly be a hotly debated, but otherwise well received, essay on the state of her country – a country which in her opinion has gone to the dogs because of its citizens’ own shortcomings.

 

In a quiet exclusive village, a brilliant and internationally recognised academician sleeps the sleep of the powerful. Yesterday is filled with the spread of influence and the words which “you will remember for the rest of your life” and insatiable demand from misguided, immature scholars who wish to say sometime later in their lives that they had taken that class.

 

The SOFT have always been a select group, one whose members pride themselves in awakening earlier than many to the realities of life. And in fact they do, and in fact their awakening is of a different sort – one that not everyone is bound to ever experience. The SOFT are resolute in their actions, carry that air of arrogance, secure in the brilliance of their own minds. Minds which they do not realise are malleable as copper and swayed like grass. And who can blame them? Their innocence has been taken from them, replaced with a blind passion to fight for things they do not understand, they cannot comprehend for all their intellect and under their scientific scrutiny.

Cecilia the brave ignores the beep from the clock which rings hourly, lights another fag and continues, “he has been running around frantically covering up his mistakes and drawing attention to the mundane actions he has taken to ensure a persistent positive image. For the educated, however, he looks every bit the con-artist, and a pathetically incompetent one at that.”

 

A boy tosses and turns in bed, unable to think of anything other than the fancy little gift a friend gave him. He dropped it somewhere, during a busy day (he blames the multiple meetings he had to attend – and his obsessive need to ever go into a meeting prepared, expertly imposing, and absolutely awesome). He lost the gift to responsibility and infallibility – and he almost whimpers to think that these are not worth the gift.

 

Demonstrations are scheduled, propaganda materials are prepared, secret meetings are held in the comfort of the night. The SOFT hang on to every word written on a website posing as an oasis where the wizened converge and converse amidst a dry landscape of sparse and insignificant thought. They believe they are the hope, and for all their proficiency in the global language (the language of radical thought) they discuss how bleak tomorrow looks. Eloquence brings them many believers, and they are comforted in the idea that they are forerunners, and that their word is worth heeding. They are after all, the smartest, the best, they are the ones who will inherit the problems and make them magically disappear. All of their ideas and their plans point to a glimmer of possibility that a brighter future is just around the corner, if the world wants it. All there is to do is to put that future in their hands.

They have never dropped a gift given through skipping meals and bending under the blanket. They have been able to replace the things they have lost in a heartbeat. Because the SOFT are the sons and daughters of the rich. There is nobody more spoiled, more disillusioned, and more misinformed than the sons and daughters of the rich who make up the invincible SOFT. Cecilia herself is SOFT, is selectively informed, and aggravates the situation through her writing, which in an oasis seems refreshing – quenching a thirst for brilliance and thoughts to be put into words, out for everybody to read and obsess over and marvel at. Cecilia will herself die of lung cancer not 40 years into life, never realising (as probably the old academician has) that the problem is not coded into the genes of her poor people, but is a failure of inaction. After all, inaction has never been in Cecilia’s dictionary – how can she be idle when she needs not think of where the next meal will come from, nor has she lost a gift borne truly from the heart, nor has she been satisfied with much less than what she has.

 

A washed up teenager picks up the dropped gift, selling it immediately for a few hours riding the sky on the high of cheap marijuana and cheap brandy. Miles away the boy who lost it sobs in bed, crushed by the reality that for all his ambition and success he has failed in the things that matter, that cannot be bought, that had his stomach been less empty the past decade of his life he would pay that much more attention. He grimaces at the idea that he might not have known the value of a gift, otherwise, and that that is the tragedy.

 

Cecilia closes her computer, having run out of words. Her abilities are running out, and she is afraid. Picture a still camera looking outwards through a window to a softly moonlit yard, the shadow of a slim girl delicately smoking outlined towards the right of the frame. In the camera eye we are celebrities, rich, famous, confident and brilliant. In the limelight, we are none of us SOFT.