The Rapture: Australia Undone

Once a tiger on a dangerous, slow, threatening stalk, no enemies, for no one dared approach, now he was a soldier in a futuristic maze, every tunnel a threat, every vagary a tunnel to the unknown.  They were circling. He was compromised. He had been pushed to the limit. All was threat. All was inconvenience. He grew more angry, stronger, by the day; and yet all around, this crumbling edifice of a country, the lying politicians, the weakness in the polity, the mess that this place had become. They were dangerous; and all those people who had whispered, "he's not as dangerous as we thought", now they could run and hide in their little caves, in those chimeric corridors where everything was a deceit.  For, as people kept saying, these are not normal times. Everything waltzed through. A moment of weakness. What was happening in this country? The entire public debate, well much of it, was now taken up with the Jewish question, the Muslim question, the Somali question, the Indi...

  Well, then, who was so cruel? Why such dynamism? Why such interest?  The wind moved through the trees. The swarm had begun. "It's happening all over the world," he heard. "They're coming out."  From all the recesses. From all the hidden places. These are not normal times; the phrase just kept repeating. Gripped, gripped by forces beyond his ken. They were rounding the corner, they were launching off cliffs, they were turning slowly and laughing in the sunlight, like whales in the sky.  Ethereal, beautiful, eternal, or at least they seemed eternal to us, such were the timespans in which they operated. And us mere mortals? Stranded here on the surface? "We are between ice ages," he was fond of saying. "How many humans will survive the next one?" While on the streets, former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, led the chant: From Gadigal to Gaza, Globalise the Intafada.    GROK The statement is accurate based on multiple reliable reports ...