A week later another woman did the same thing. She stripped naked and ran through the streets singing. But that day changed the history of the world. For the police chased after the woman, caught up with her and, in full public view, ate her raw. They tore her flesh and drank her blood and ate chunks of her buttocks and gorged themselves on her bones.

After that a new madness came among the people.

At night, in a restless neighborhood, someone might be heard screaming. Those who looked out of the window saw a white van appear outside the house. An hour later men in uniformed would be seen emerging from the house with blood on their faces and blood and gristle on their shirts as if they had been feasting on raw wild animals. The next day nothing but the cracked skull and long bones of the victim were seen in the bedroom.

A new stage in the elimination of undesirables had been reached.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds — cooled — and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

"They will ask us in the future how it happened,
who allowed it, how could we just ignore it
when it stormed in so loudly,
like a thunderous beast,
could we not hear it?
This half beast half demon sitting
outside our doors, growling,
baring teeth, ready to rip out
the throats of whole people
erase the marginalized,
rip into the bones of the vulnerable,
why did we just sit there and watch
helplessly, asking no questions,
show them the evidence of
the thunderous applause
each act of cruelty is greeted with,
show them the raucous laughter
with which they celebrate the pain
each marginalized person feels
as their rights and liberties are taken.

Let them see for themselves
The bare bones of truth
until they realise, like us, horrified,
"The cruelty was the point.
My God, the cruelty was the point.