want to know you any longer. In the particular troubles we find ourselves in and the distinct way events are unfolding, we see a variety of goodbyes closely related to people's wealth.
Some people are saying goodbye to you, others are saying it's me who is leaving.
With well-off girls going on training course in the woods where they learn to say goodbye to the lesser fortunate, pensioners are saying goodbye to themselves. They have lost all their savings while allowances are being cut and even put up to questioning. Who wants to take care of those useless eaters when our beloved banks are in need of precious money?
What were looking to be another twenty wealthy years, quietly observing where it all were heading and perhaps even live to be a hundred (ever more people were) for many has quickly become waiting for life to end.
Then there's the people trying to escape from it all. The younger of them go abroad sometimes. In growing numbers they seek relief in countries at the heart of matters. Or so it is believed those places are. They learn the language and get lonely and more often than not return to their old lives, hoping to capitalise on their perceived worldliness. (The ones with more stamina reportedly are doing fine.) Back home the crowds with nowhere to go are preparing for going into hiding. Some may not know it yet but all are showing the typical behaviour. They think of ways of self-sufficiency and are collecting means of survival. They're not sure they will have got what it takes and they wouldn't mind the end to be postponed another economic cycle further, much shorter once again this time.
But let's begin uphill, where girls' lives are mostly untouched by society's financial woes.
Uphill girls are sweet and happy and they have every reason to be cheerful and good-
looking. The recently declared new optimism is certainly felt in their circles.
Storm clouds are gathering, though, for even the rich to see. While the lower classes live far away in their own poor people's neighbourhoods, the number of left behinds again has swollen, as it will after every next inevitable crisis. It has become impossible not to notice the pattern. Money is surging upwards at ever higher speed and the day will come when it all explodes in our faces. That's when drastic measures are to follow. The girls who are studying to get a not so great job or no job at all, much better the latter, and who are spending their youth being sweet at heart, or so they think - these bearers of the future are thought to be wholly unprepared for the measures' impact. Some might even start to feel sorry for the ones whose admittance has expired. While boys are generally not supposed to need any training, rich brads get their uppance exercised to resist foreseeable waves of pity, a natural but undesirable emotion which must be securely suppressed.
So they are sent on one of those long weekends in a medieval farmhouse with fruits hanging from trees, where they bond under bridges and in other places where smoking isn't controlled and where they learn to love their good fortune. They then descend onto one of the lost districts to see what fate has in store for the poor. Will they be able to keep their eyes dry and their hearts untouched at the sight of so much suffering?
Some girls are fine with one outing. They happily return to their lives and go on their business as if the whole affair had been lost on them. They were never part of the risk population, of course. Others feel honestly depressed at the thought of having to say goodbye to so many everyday people, people they had never known and would never know, but whom they shared a city with, people that make up the numbers their home town's status in the world is determined by. Medium big city. That will all be gone soon.
The more sensitive among these girls get to showing resistance, futile and meek but with a sense of rebellion nonetheless. They are then punished by sending them further away where they will meet girls from other places in similar positions. This strengthens their beliefs yet at the same time weakens their resolve. The world is too big to deal with and the sense of globalness demoralising. In the end they too will come back. They tend to marry well and produce healthy children, like their mothers have done in their day. As it had always been.
In the meantime new cohorts come to the fore, always beautiful and caring. Heartless people are making money of their unsettledness.
The ever poorer are not that fortunate, with the elderly lacking the physical and mental strength to confront the increasingly hard times ahead. They started out their life in misery and only through hard work did they manage to slowly improve their situation, with a feeling of rightly earned comfort showing up with the new century. They have given it all they had, their bodies strained and their desires faded, so how are they supposed to react? They simply adjust their spending to the new minimum and they know there won't be any help when they will most need it. From witnesses of prosperity they have become spectators of their own demise. Moreover, the old have grown afraid of knowing what's to come since they don't wish to be part of the next present under the circumstances they have been thrown into. Every day they care less who they are. They hang in for another pay check, another winter, another summer. They don't know when it will end for them and they have stopped caring. Leaving is like dying a bit, the French like to say. For some it has become dying in full.
