The Story Of Globalization

Once there was a peaceful town in the middle of Algeranzania.  It was in a lush valley and most of the villagers were farmers who had never gone more a few miles outside the town.  Everyone knew each other and everyone was friends.  They had feasts celebrating harvests and birthdays and the start of spring and everything.  A few people died of disease, but they were mostly old and had lived good, full lives.

There was a boy named Fred.  He was friends with many of the other children and they played in the forests and fields around the town.  His best friend was Mark, who's grandparents always had interesting stories to tell because they had came from another town that was 50 miles away.  Fred and Mark had spent some days listening to the stories they had to tell and asking questions.  Fred was interested in farming and often helped his parents with the work.

Then some people came in on a truck with a picture of shell on it.  They said they were from Shell Oil and were going to pay the townspeople to drill oil.  Some other companies said they wanted to build factories there.  Fred thought it all sounded very interesting and exciting.  The people in the town decided to throw a feast.

A few days later, Shell started drilling.  It was not like anything they had ever expected.  Shell was drilling in farms and tearing things up to put in large tunnels made of metal.  Fred nearly fainted when he saw his parent's farm ripped up, and tried to get them to stop, but the workers just shooed him off.

It seemed Fred wasn't the only one.  The villagers organized protests against the Shell.  The oil company used brute force and harsh crowd control tactics against them and got the government to execute the leaders of the protests.  Fred hadn't heard about this "government," and most of the other villagers also hadn't, but what right did they have to go around killing people?  Many of them had children that were friends of Fred!

Other companies started building factories to support the oil company's drilling.  Fred's parents, lacking any other source of income, decided to work there.  From what they told Fred, it was horrible work in awful conditions, and the amount they were paid per day, 20 Algeranzanain cents, didn't seem like much.  Large businesses began shipping in food in packages, nothing like the fresh food they had grown.  But these businesses could make it cheap since they also used cheap labor.  The price of a day's food seemed to be around 20 cents, though, so there was really no choice except to keep working.

When Fred turned 14, his parents gave him a tough choice: he could either work at the factory with them, because they could no longer feed him, or he would have to leave and deal with problems on his own.  Fred thought it was an exciting change to go off on his own, so he did.  Since the drilling began, the companies had been saying things like, "Now you have more money!  You were in poverty before," and "The life expectancy has gone up, as well as education!  The quality of life must be going up!"

But Fred begged to differ.  His life hadn't improved.  Nonetheless, this had rubbed of on several people, who thought this "capitalism" was a good idea and they joined the Republican Party of Algeranzania.  Fred, against this, joined the Popular Socialist Party of Algeranzania.

TO BE CONTINUED

Chapter 2: 2nd Re-write

   I tried jumped off a cliff, but fortunately for me, I missed the cliff and crashed into a tree.  The tree, being highly unstable, exploded.  The explosion blasted out a giant crater and launched me, along with most of the other debris, into Earth orbit.  After a few weeks it formed into a ring.  As interesting as it was, there was not much air so I jumped onto a antimatter rocket and flew off into the unknown.

   Within a few days I was beyond the orbit of Pluto.  I looked around an noticed everything around moving very quickly.  I then realized I was going near the speed of light and time was slowing down for me.  Even so, supplies would not last long enough to get to the nearest star so I gravity-slingshot off the nearest large body of matter and flew toward Jupiter.  I figured I could gravity-slingshot off that to reach the Earth.  However, I ran out of anti-matter and the energy of the spacecraft shut off, leaving the cold of space to cool the ship down quickly.

    I realized the danger I was in, so I crash landed on the Jovian moon Europa.  The native Europans found me on top of the ice sheet that covered the entire planet.  These explorers were much like the ones on Earth exploring the North Pole, and they acted as if they had made a great discovery of a species living above the ice.  They took me back on the long journey through the ice tunnels into the sheets.

   They seemed like a friendly race and tried to feed me what they had.  It was not the best of food, but they didn't seem to like it much either so I figured it was just rotten and not the normal diet of the Europans.  They tried communicating with me but failed epically and gave up.  Even so, they did make attempts to teach me their language, but the structures of their mouths are so different I found myself incapable of speaking it. 

   Several weeks later, we reached the ocean.  They seemed rather annoyed that I could not breathe in the water, but they found some air for me to breathe anyway.  We began a journey through the rather bright oceans, lit up by massive volcanoes beneath us.  There were huge columns of lava shooting up through the water before cooling and sinking back down.  We boarded a large craft that seemed rather like a sailboat except it used the warm currents of the ocean to sail along.

   The sailing-submarine went along at a high speed and we saw others zooming by.  Every once in a while we had to dodge a large burst of lava, but these were infrequent and not a large danger.  The only real danger that came to us was leaving a current, something that happened a few times and required us to row back into one; this was hard to do because the currents were invisible.

    Soon we reached a large underwater city built around a volcano.  The lava glowed very bright and lit up the streets of the city.  Many of the Europans were in the streets.  Our ship came to the city and was tied up at a port.  We were heartily greeted by many and soon a crowd surrounded us, amazed by me and the return of people from a place that was not even known to exist.  What was above the ice was not known, and few thought it existed.  The existence of me proved them wrong.

    I would have said the view from the port was great except that it wasn't.  Though the volcano I stood on rose very high up, the light of the volcano did not shine far enough to see what was below.  A few streams of lava I could see, but not much else.  

   A Europan grabbed me and indicated that I should swim toward the palace near the port.  I began swimming with a few Europans, not knowing what would happen next.

To Be Continued...  Or not. 

You know what they say!

AWL TOASHTAS, TOWST TOWST!