Featured Writer: Arndt Britschgi

-god's children-

it's not their fault that they were born into the world, you can't accuse them

-but it's the fault of their adult and self-proclaimed progenitors, of which in turn they are in vitro miniatures or latent copies-

of the greed and exploitation of the weakest elements, the ruthlessness and institutionalized injustice which allows part of the world's child population to be starving to the death while they themselves choke on their hamburgers and fries, coke, chocolate bars, ice-cream, or cereals, or pastry cakes, or donuts, or whatever, dull-eyedly chewing as they watch the others perish on their screens, avidly auto-force-feeding to walking globs of tons of grease, beyond all apposite proportions of perverse obesity, narrowly self-centered and pitilessly seeking their advantage, prejudiced, deadly ambitious for good status and a gain, the basic raw material for any fascist social rule where to defend one's own professional position justifies whatever means defending just that goal conceivably commands: the great promoters of the death camps of half-dormant holocausts, executives of global networks of oppression with the aim of guaranteeing what is infrangibly, undoubtedly theirs: their way of life, their homes, their people and their freedom to consume (in other words, what's actually god-givenly, meritedly ours - or more precisely yet, what's mine); fanatic zealots of a world on which they're bound once to unleash their gathered power of destruction in preemptive/suicide blows, as yet in latent or in vitro, budding stage;

though it's abhorrent when you see how they adopt, without resistance, will-lessly but largely eager to conform, the outward patterns of behavior and the values they are taught, the hypocritical rhetoric and the fashions of adults, you should remember that they're innocent, and harmless in a way, because they can't be held responsible for being what they are, or being here, they're not the cause of it or anything themselves (this should be true of everybody, everybody in the world, as from their birth until the end of their existence), for in the end they're really nothing more than only that exactly: they're only kids, nothing but sweet, mischievous kids, our bunch of darlings;

but then at some point, sooner or later you will start asking yourself whose fault it finally could be if that's the case, if what we've got here is an infinite regress vs a source, or cause (of evil for the most part, that would be) if you prefer; which would be God to those who've chosen to profess to that idea, despite our knowledge of the camps and world-wide infantile starvation and the rest of what, beyond any denying, we experience on our screens/right in our midst



Arndt Britschgi was born and raised in Finland. He spent the best (if not the longest) part of his life in Madrid, Spain, and recently took his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His writing has appeared in Literary Fragments, Kulttuurivihkot (Finnish), Southern Cross Review, the EOTU Ezine, Word Riot, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Milk Magazine, and The Modern Review.


Email: Arndt Britschgi

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