Monday, February 18, 2019

Microstory 1041: Archie

Most people think that my full name is Archibald, and because it’s kind of an antiquated name, my peers like to use it instead. My real name is actually Archer, which my parents desperately want me to be using instead, but then I’m constantly fighting this belief that I’m good at archery. Archery isn’t the last thing I would be doing, but I’m not interested in sports, and I don’t want anything to distract from my true message. I’m an active and healthy person, but my primary concern is promoting a well-balanced diet, and removing all the terrible things that the corporations put in our food. A lot of people probably don’t remember that I too ran for student body president, as a fourth candidate. Almost no one voted for me, though, because I was honest with my campaign promises, and they were not promises anyone wanted me to keep. When I started dating my girlfriend, Martha last year, I gave her my password to a certain movie and television library, because she isn’t eighteen yet. She’s stopped having very much time for it, but her viewing habits are still impacting my recommendations. She’s obsessed with learning, and finds documentaries to be the best source of her education, so I started seeing a lot of stuff on there that I wouldn’t normally watch. One of these such docs was about how corn is basically destroying the country. I won’t get into specifics here, because the topic needs its own monthly periodical, for Christ’s sake, but the takeaway is that there’s corn in everything, and the toxic waste it produces is harming the environment as much as fossil fuel. I ran my campaign on changing the way this school does business, and my fellow students either didn’t like it, or were totally indifferent. I wanted to overhaul our lunch menu, and get rid of all the magazines. Why would we get rid of magazines? Well, there’s corn in them too, which is insane. I mean, we shouldn’t be consuming so much paper anyway, because corn isn’t the only thing that’s causing us to head towards the apocalypse, but try telling that to a group of self-involved hormonal teens. Anyway, Viola was the only one who really paid attention to what I was saying, but she also realized that there was no way I would win. Instead of trying to support me, which probably would have been a waste of time, she modified her own campaign to better reflect the values that I was trying to push. As you know, she didn’t win either, and the both of us have always suspected this to be the reason, but that didn’t mean what she did was pointless. Though Riley ultimately won the election, people actually started listening to my warnings, and things are changing. The menu is still filled with tons of unhealthy ingredients, but there’s a lot less high fructose corn syrup than there was before you got here. You couldn’t walk ten meters without running into another soda machine, but they’re all gone now. I didn’t do that; Viola did, and the greatest sadness is that this revolution is only one of what could have been very many that she popularized. What other great change could she have inspired in this world if she hadn’t died so young? That’s what I wanna know.

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