(Another story I submitted to the Aspiring Writers Short Story Challenge on LinkedIn. The challenge is you have to craft a very short story about the subject of the month. That month the subject was "Leaving". The story has to fit in one LinkedIn comment. That means it has to be fewer than 1250 characters … not words, characters! Characters are letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces. However, it doesn’t seem to count spaces from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line – weird. So the story is usually about 200 to 250 words. This exercise certainly gets you in tuned with unnecessary words and can be fun. This one tends to be more an essay than story. )
Once upon a time there was a country, the greatest country in the world. They overthrew the most powerful oppressive monarchy on earth and declared their independence. Then over 160 years later, when that monarchy was in jeopardy from a racist fascist dictator who was conquering Europe, they came to their aid and vanquished him!
Alas, eventually they became a victim of their own creativity, and fell under the spell of reality TV and something called "spin". Many forgot social sciences and were not alarmed when told by those in charge that there were airports in the 1700's and Alabama was now on the east coast. They forgot their greatness came from their inherent diversity. They were heading down the paths of those which they overthrew and then later vanquished. They were losing touch with memory of anything about those paths. It was leaving, fading ... "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it’s gone."
Comments