Sunday Story- Recrudesce

Before you read the story, consider purchasing my newest vocabulary collection:The Filthy Easy Guide to Vocab: Second Batch.

Recrudesce- to break out again; recur

Ex: The recrudescence of Measles in this country after its apparent extinction exposed a couple of harsh truths about American society: That we are only concerned with matters that directly affect our own well-being. And, that we aren’t willing to put preventative measures in place to get ahead of societal issues, we’d rather wait until they rear their ugly head, and then scramble to figure out a solution on the fly. That’s why now in the downtown of any major city, you will find hordes of fentanyl zombies hunched over, stumbling around trash-filled hellscapes. Nobody had the foresight to realize that when you arrest drug addicts instead of giving them treatment, they return to the outside world with their old habits still intact.

This is where I step into the picture. I’m a solutions guy. When the government needs help, and they need it fast, they usually dial up ole Clemenstein. I’ve already brainstormed a solution that’ll kill two birds with one stone. It’s really quite simple. We set up barricades in the fentanyl user areas of these cities, rounding them up and containing them so that they cannot leak out into the surrounding city environment (not that they’d be able to travel anywhere at a speed above one third of one mile per hour). We recruit fat, unemployed, Call of Duty-addicted, man-children from the suburbs, arm them with guns that shoot out dissolvable bullets filled with Narcan and Adderall, and send them to these boarded up industrial wastelands under the guise that they are participating in some sort of beta-testing for a hyper-realistic augmented reality version of Call of Duty Zombies.

In a matter of days, all of the fentanyl zombies will be transformed into über-productive, upstanding members of society. But what now? How are we going to give them jobs, houses, a sense of purpose, you might ask? Easy. We flip the script. We arm the recovering drug abusers with nightsticks, and have them force all of the fat man-children into the addict enclosures. We airdrop desktop computers into the walled-off regions, and play the following message over an intercom for them all to hear: “Listen up, fatties. Play time is over. It’s time to gain some hard skills. For the next two weeks you will be participating in a Microsoft Excel boot camp, where you will learn to speak the language of Excel fluently. By the end of the two weeks, the most advanced Excel user will be gifted a lifetime supply of Totino’s pizza rolls and a new copy of Baldur’s Gate 3.”. My ethics may be questionable, but it’s not as if the government hasn’t engaged in some morally ambiguous activity in the past. Remember when college science classes were teaching students that black people had an extra bone in their feet that made them run faster? Yea, that was pretty messed up. But I bet you didn’t know that the pages of those racial science textbooks were made from the dried skin of Native American babies, and the spines of those books were crafted from the hardened leg tendons of the less fair Native women in some sort of fucked up spin on the traditional indigenous belief in making use of every part of the animal. No, I’m just kidding. You should have seen the look on your face! All of a sudden my plan didn’t seem so bad! But yes, Nazi race science was at least partially informed by US eugenics teachings in the early 20^th century.