The decline had begun long before the Chairman’s rise. Cora and Alex had watched it unfold piece by piece, each event compounding the last, each policy, each crisis, each moment of manufactured outrage slowly eroding the foundation beneath them. It wasn’t an explosion or a sudden collapse; it was a slow-motion landslide, an entire country sliding into something unrecognizable while its people, distracted by everyday survival, barely noticed until it was too late.
For years, the older generations had been told a simple truth: hard work led to success. If you put in the effort, you could climb the ladder, make a living, build a future. But that truth had started to crack long before Cora and Alex had entered adulthood. The dream had been chipped away, piece by piece, until only a shell remained. Wages stagnated. Costs soared. The minimum wage, once enough to pay rent and survive, had been rendered meaningless. Young people took on debt to earn degrees that promised careers but delivered unpaid internships and layoffs. The older generations, insulated in their suburban homes with their long-forgotten mortgages, dismissed it as laziness.
Then the pandemic came, and the illusion shattered.
At first, it had been a crisis of survival. Businesses shut their doors, entire industries crumbled, and millions found themselves locked inside, left to fend for themselves in a system that had never cared for them. Essential workers were praised as heroes, yet their wages never changed. When the lockdowns ended, the corporations that had bled dry the working class boasted record profits while their workers returned to slashed hours and fewer benefits. There was no reward for loyalty, no prize for enduring the crisis. There was only more suffering, more struggle, and more wealth hoarded at the top.
Remote work offered a brief reprieve, a promise of flexibility, of an escape from cities where rent consumed more than half a paycheck. But it was a trap. Jobs were outsourced, departments gutted overnight. Career ladders were kicked away entirely, leaving even the most qualified scrambling for security. College graduates, once promised the world, found themselves working side jobs just to afford groceries. Those without degrees were left behind entirely, their options shrinking with each passing year.
And then came the culture war.
It started with simple things—movies, books, ads showing faces that didn’t fit the mold of decades past. Inclusion was framed not as progress but as an attack. Politicians, media personalities, entire networks dedicated themselves to convincing an aging, disillusioned population that their way of life was being stolen from them.
They had spent their youth believing in a world where effort equaled success, but now they saw the rules changing, and they weren’t sure how to keep up. The fear took root. The rage followed. And soon, they were looking for someone to blame.
The rich bragged openly, unashamed of their excess. CEOs boasted about record-breaking quarters, their bonuses soaring into the hundreds of millions while their employees worked longer hours for stagnant wages. The stock market surged, and those at the top reveled in their growing portfolios, speaking in interviews about how the economy had never been better, how opportunity was everywhere, how those who struggled simply weren’t trying hard enough. It didn’t matter that most people didn’t own stocks, that most families couldn’t afford even a fraction of the luxury the wealthy took for granted. The corporations flooded the airwaves with their success stories, their carefully curated messages of triumph, while the people who kept those companies running were left behind.
The government followed suit, cutting taxes again, just as they always did. But only for the rich. Only for those who already had more than they could spend. The same promises were made—economic growth, job creation, prosperity trickling down like rain from above—but the rain never came. The roads crumbled. Schools suffered. Hospitals stretched their resources thin while costs for basic care skyrocketed. The safety nets that once caught the desperate were shredded in the name of efficiency, of self-reliance, of getting people off government dependence. But only the poor were ever expected to be independent. The corporations took their tax breaks and funneled them into stock buybacks. The rich pocketed their savings and called it freedom.
For everyone else, life became tighter, harder. The price of food rose. Gasoline became a luxury. Rent devoured paychecks, and the dream of homeownership became just that—a dream. People worked longer hours, took second jobs, sacrificed what little time they had with their families just to keep their heads above water. And still, it wasn’t enough. They watched as executives gave themselves record bonuses, as billionaires built rockets to leave a planet they were bleeding dry. They heard the politicians on television praise the economy, claiming it was the best it had ever been, as if that meant anything to the millions who couldn’t afford an emergency.
The media kept the cycle going, feeding them carefully curated outrage, telling them exactly who was responsible for their suffering, even as the real culprits smiled from their penthouses. They swallowed it whole.
And beneath all of it, the quiet, growing anger of a country that had been hollowed out.
Cora and Alex saw it coming, even if most didn’t. They watched as the older generation, the ones who had been promised stability and retirement, realized too late that those promises had been empty all along. They watched as their parents, their neighbors, their colleagues latched onto the idea that someone had stolen the life they were supposed to have.
Older voters watched the world shift around them, not gradually, not gently, but with a force that felt uncontrollable. The faces on television no longer looked like theirs. The voices on the radio spoke in languages they didn’t understand. The rules of polite society, the unspoken expectations they had lived by, had changed, and no one had asked for their permission. What once felt like the natural order of things—familiar, predictable, safe—had become foreign and unrecognizable.
At first, it was just discomfort, a creeping unease at the edges of their lives. But discomfort turned to fear, and fear was cultivated. Nurtured. Amplified. Politicians and pundits spoke directly to them, their words carefully chosen, their warnings dire. This was not just economic struggle, they were told. This was not just a shifting market, a changing workforce, the natural evolution of culture. No, this was an attack. A war.
They were being erased.
Their history was being rewritten, their traditions mocked, their place in the world shrinking. They saw new laws, new protections, new celebrations that did not include them, and instead of seeing progress, they saw exclusion. Their children spoke in ways they didn’t understand, their grandchildren questioned beliefs they had always accepted as truth. The world they had built, the one they had sacrificed for, was being taken away from them piece by piece.
So, they clung to the past. They longed for the old days, for a time when the world had made sense, when men were strong and women were obedient, when communities were small and predictable, when the news told them what they already believed to be true. They whispered about the days before political correctness, before pronouns and diversity quotas, before they had to apologize for things that never needed apologizing for.
And in that longing, in that desperation to stop the march of progress, they opened the door.
They welcomed the ones who promised to turn back the clock. They cheered for the men who fed their fear, who told them that they were the true victims, that they had been wronged, that they had the right to take it all back. They did not see that the men making these promises had no intention of giving them back anything at all.
The storm was coming.
And when it finally arrived, it would wash everything away.
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