It began in the fall of 2019, when farmers, looking out over their fields of plump ripe grain waiting in the sun to be harvested, or bringing in fat bales of hay for the winter feeding of their stock, broke down weeping in desperate abhorrence.
"What is the use of this backbreaking labor, repeated year after year after year until we're old and crazed?" they asked their children and spouses in despair. Then they stopped their harvest work to sit on their front steps, howling in anguish at the banality and senselessness of exploiting the animal and the plant kingdoms.
Their deep seated repulsion affected their families. Farm wives wearied of baking bread and putting up preserves; their children grew sick of 4-H programs and high school football. The countryside waxed slack-jawed and hollow, with denizens lethargically shambling into civic arenas and hockey rinks to hold group mopes.
From there the Revulsion, as it was now called, spread into cities. Financial institutions shut down as their employees poured out from their offices, screaming "the love of money is the root of all evil!"
Police found their guns too heavy to carry, and told anyone who would listen that violence and coercion were infantile, and futile in the long run. Fire departments across the land let buildings burn to the ground rather than let streams of mindless water lose, water which was so inert and inane that firefighters couldn't bear any further association with it.
Crooks and cartels gave up, too. Assault rifles needed endless care and oiling; better to let them rust than spend one more minute on their soulless upkeep. Prisons were emptied, as both guards and inmates walked away from their symbiotic suffering with a shrug of the shoulders, muttering "whatever."
Bakers could no longer stand the sight of flour. Doctors told their patients to 'take two aspirin and never call me again.' Artists stopped creating, throwing away their brushes and paints, their chisels and marble, to morosely sit around working crossword puzzles. Writers and poets simply gathered in large groups and silently set fire themselves on fire. They were not missed.
Teachers told their pupils to go home and prepare for a lifetime of triviality. Politicians and legislators donned hair shirts and wandered away into the wilderness, subsisting on wild honey and lobbyists.
This Revulsion, this great turning away in disgust from normal pursuits and interests, should have ended in a world-wide graveyard as famine and disease took deadly hold. But on the brink of extinction it was discovered that buttered popcorn, when ingested on a regular basis, restored mental balance and dried up the weeping horror of daily life. For movie theaters had become the last bastion of survival in the darkest days of the Revulsion -- and pimply ushers in ill-fitting and rancid uniforms, musty from glory days long gone, had continued to make popcorn even as they groaned at the empty calories of it all. Providentially, there were immense stores of theater popcorn in warehouses all over the world. As bags of popcorn spread from person to person, the Revulsion slowly lifted, and retreated -- until it was contained on an island in the Sea of Japan, where the remnants of the Revulsion still exist to this day . . . eating white bread and hiring out as telemarketers.
