Dogs of Orninica

by Unedo, Daniel

  I did manage to kill two birds with one stone there, though. That bitch won't ever treat me like a free babysitting service again, and that pook always riding that damn noisy motorcycle up and down the street won't be riding anywhere ever again. Collided into a brick wall dodging that pup, he did. All I know is they'd better not expect the taxpayer to pick up the bill to fix that wall. It's bad enough we had to pay to scrape him off the road. Should make the pup's mother pay for the damage, she's responsible for the little turd.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Anonymous Revolutionary II

  I have just returned from the most incredible journey imaginable. The inspiring, beautiful things I saw during my travels to Nureongi will stay with me for the rest of my days. I am so utterly and profoundly moved by the wonders I have been witness to, all thanks to Mr. Harvey Fidelbrook; my benefactor and traveling companion in the breathtaking untamed wilderness that is Nureongi. I can't thank him enough for allowing me to be part of this amazing expedition with him.

  We landed on a short and narrow little airstrip inside a clearing, surrounded by lush forest. When the three of us left the airplane, we were surrounded by a group of young maidens, each a representative of a different Nureongi tribe. They all wore on their heads a different decorative wreath, which acts as the insignia for their tribe. Like all Nureongi, they wore no other clothing. Their bare fur was inked with the juices from various plants and berries, forming intricate designs.

  The young ladies welcomed each of us separately, apparently genuinely excited to make our acquaintance. They showed a lot of interest in my regrettably rather portly belly, rubbing and poking it with rousing curiosity and much laughter.

  We were escorted by foot to a nearby campsite where some of the elders of each tribe awaited. They greeted us with open arms and invited us to sit in their circle and eat with them. Their celebratory feast featured an assortment of wild game and foraged herbs. They had even prepared some corn-mash for the more squeamish members of our party.

  The elders spoke one at a time, and a young female acted as translator. They explained how their society is structured, with the tribes being completely autonomous, but meeting regularly to trade with each other. Everyone is welcome to move around freely, and it is strongly encouraged for dogs to marry outside of their tribe to strengthen the genetics of the population.

  Sometimes, when dogs aren't happy with the policies of their tribe, they will leave and join a tribe that they feel better represents their personal needs. If such a tribe doesn't exist, then they are free to pick out some unused land and start their own tribe.

  Trade is conducted using a barter system. A common market is set up once a week, where all the tribes trade with each other. The market value of each good is decided by basic principles of supply and demand. If something is highly sought after, the trading price increases.

  Rather than each individual trading one-on-one, each tribe instead deposits the goods provided by all their members to the market's repository, and then receives from the market desired goods of equal value. The newly traded for goods are then distributed among the tribe depending on who needs each item most urgently.

  Particular skills such as iron-working and pond-building are highly desired but in short supply, so skilled technicians are loaned out by their tribe to all the other tribes that need work done, in exchange for various goods and services.

  The elders mentioned that our lovely young translator had lived with at least twenty different tribes at various times, as part of her intense training. She could speak an amazing eighteen languages fluently, including three non-Nureongi languages. Most Nureongi learn their trade by apprenticing with several skilled artisans for several years, while a few, particularly in pioneering fields, are self-taught.

  It's common for a Nureongi to change vocations frequently, even into old age. One of the elders told me he was currently a carpenter's apprentice. At the ripe old age of 84! Said he just felt like a change from his previous line of work as a zip-line operator.

  The arts are very important to the Nureongi. Artists are given free reign to create their works, but they are also expected to contribute food to the pot. In all the tribes, food always comes first. Once everyone has been fed, only then are creative pursuits followed. No one spends all their time doing just one thing, as even the most skilled technicians are expected to add some food to the pile. Generally, a sculptor will spend three days sculpting, and three days attaining food for the tribe. The seventh day is typically for rest and celebration.

  Food is acquired in various ways. While most tribes prefer to focus on hunting and gathering, others have embraced small-scale agriculture. Gardening is widespread, especially pond gardens for producing fish and water vegetables at the same time. The fish feed the vegetables and the vegetables feed the fish, and both feed the tribe. It's all very fascinating and self-sustaining. As a lot of the tribes are nomadic, they maintain gardens in two separate locations and move between them depending on the season.

  Small rafts made from palm fronds and bamboo are knotted together and floated in the ponds. Vegetables are planted directly onto the rafts, their roots reaching into the water below and absorbing nutrients as fast as they're released by the fish. Underwater plants are left for the fish, crustaceans and mollusks to feed on.

  As for housing, each tribe has its preferred building materials. Some tribes bring their entire houses with them as they migrate for the winter. These unique designs are collapsible and lightweight and depending on the tribe, they can be made from bamboo, vines, sticks, leather, fabric, etc. Tribes that don't migrate need sturdier, more insulated structures, so they use a variety of different materials including mud, straw, manure and stone. But never logs, there seems to be a taboo against felling trees to build structures.

  Spirituality is very important to a lot of the tribes, but it is seen as a deeply personal pursuit. There are no common places of worship, or regulations telling them how to worship. Instead, every Nureongi worships in his own way on his own terms, usually alone or with his immediate family while tending to their duties in the woodlands. They have no big wealthy organizations that claim to represent divinity incarnate on earth.

  I was fascinated to hear that there is nothing even close to a police force or court system in Nureongi. The closest approximate they have are trusted old hermits that settle disputes between feuding dogs. As these hermits aren't members of any tribe, they can presumably be impartial when deciding how to solve a disagreement between two parties. Apparently, once the hermit has come to a decision, no bad blood remains and the issue is permanently resolved. The wisdom of the hermit is trusted implacably.

  In a situation where a grave injustice has been committed, such as murder, it is always dealt with internally by the affected community. If he runs, the criminal is tracked and captured by his neighbors, and the elders decide the punishment. Usually it involves banishment at sea. The elders made sure to stress that serious crime like this is exceedingly rare; once or twice in a generation, and usually a crime of passion.

  It's interesting that the only dogs that leave Nureongi have committed murder and been cast out. It explains a lot about our culture's depiction of Nureongi as vicious savages, since throughout the ages, we've only ever gotten to know the banished bad seeds that drift into our seas.

  Before they enter into an apprenticeship in their teens, pups generally do as they please. They play and forage in the woods and fields, follow their parents around; watching and learning from them. They listen to storytellers and watch plays in the village square, they create and trade artworks and collect insects and rocks. Some of them start little gardens and ponds of their own, or help tend the family garden.

  It's very telling that there is no word for 'boredom' in any of the Nureongi tongues. Every moment of every day is filled with things to do and see. Simply observing nature can take up hours of a pup's time.

  Pups were running in and out of the tent, laughing and playing
the whole time we met with the elders. I've never seen so many happy puppies. In Orninica, I'm so used to pups being silent and solemn, walking slowly and deliberately in a straight line, as if they're afraid to accidentally take a wrong step and fall into a pit of scorn. These pups were a whole other animal, and it truly filled me with sadness that our own pups are so without spark.

  The one thing that most separates the Nureongi civilization from our own is their complete lack of a banking establishment. There is no fiat currency, no debt, no way to speculate with land or stocks. There's no inflation or haircuts or bail-outs. Even mortgages are a completely foreign concept to the Nureongi. I tried to explain the concept to one of the elders, and he was sure I was kidding him. He just kept laughing and insisting I was pulling his leg.

  When a Nureongi couple get married, the community comes together and builds them a home. There's no mortgage or home-owners insurance or property tax or anything. Just a house big enough to home and sustain one family. No fountains or stone columns or dual garages and twin hot-tubs in sight. Just a simple structure built lovingly by the community in celebration of a young couple starting out in life together. And they wouldn't have it any other way.

  It makes me wonder what Orninica would be like if we woke up tomorrow and all the banks had vanished. If the debt were suddenly reset and our homes didn't take a lifetime of inflated installments to pay for, but instead a few days of blissful co-operation with our fellow-citizens. Everyone would be able to afford a home. Suddenly, we would be free to pursue whatever interests we felt like pursuing. Our lives would be our own again. We wouldn't need to spend two lifetimes slaving away in cubicles to pay for big ugly indestructible buildings that seem to be designed for some unknown race of dogs that can live for centuries.

  We would actually be able to live in our homes, rather than spending every waking moment working tirelessly to maintain them, only making it home to collapse asleep at night. We could breathe easy, knowing the banks couldn't foreclose on our lives the moment we missed an installment, leaving us to starve to death out in the cold.

  Just imagine a world without banks.

  No more crony capitalism; the collusion of big business, special interests, and intrusive government into one massive cesspool of corruption and misery for everyone not born a Fifi or a Rupulfort. No more printing millions out of thin air, creating miserable inflation, to fend off inevitable economic collapse for another day.

  Our two societies are so different in so many ways, but I believe strongly that every Orninican's inherent seeping, restless misery is directly and deliberately put upon us by our bankers. They leech our life-force to fill their private islands with mountains of loot they have plundered from us. They have robbed the future from our pups, and our pups, pups, pups.

  Shutter the banks and Orninica will soon be as free and joyful as the great and prosperous Nureongi civilization. Our pups will smile again. The skies will clear again. It's so clear to me now, every ill in the world inevitably leads back to the banking cartels that have trapped us in never-ending serfdom. We're in debt to them before we're even a twinkle in our mother's eye. Removing the banks would reverse so much misery, we would be freed from our subjugation for the first time.

  You might scoff and call me naive, insisting that Orninica is far too big to adopt such an anarchic political system, with such loose rules. That Orninica is too great, too cultured, too civilized to hear of such brazen freehanded notions. But it's all smokescreen. At its deepest level, Orninica is ultimately no different than Nureongi. The common dogs sitting in their cubicles in the sprawling cities ask for no more out of life than a Nureongi netting fish from a pond.

  The corporations convince us we need piles and piles of things, to be acquired with mountains of credit. I say, push the mountains over. Let them collapse back into the nothingness they came from. All we need is each other; interconnected communities of like-minded livers of life.

  It really isn't as complicated as they try to make it seem. Life doesn't come from an assembly line, dogs aren't commodities to be pushed around and managed like stocks and bonds. Brothers and sisters, burn your birth certificates, sink your passports into the sea, let go of absurd notions of nationality and strangling omnipotent government.

  We don't need a rubber stamp from a civil servant to officiate ourselves as deceased, just think of the absurdity of this concept; a death certificate! Why would a life need certification and licensing and proof of citizenship every step of the way, in order to be legitimate? What is citizenship exactly? The right to exist on a government's soil? What is a government? An 'organized political unit'? When did we hand this almighty political unit the right to decide who gets to be born, to live and die on the lands that have stood here, stoically for millennia? To decide whether we are worthy of existence.

  We can be free dogs, if only we stop granting these despots the power to dictate to us, to define for us what life has to be, with their vile self-serving agendas. Just say no to this overt pyramid scheme we call government, cast out our oppressors and their lies and overhaul everything. Return to logical natural systems, where the earth isn't treated like an unruly convict that needs to be beaten and stomped down and reshaped to fit some disconnected paragon of falsity. Where volumes upon volumes of laws, codes and regulations aren't needed to instruct us how to inhabit our own planet.

  Unless we allow them to, they cannot tell us what a life is, what civilization has to be, what we have to do in order to exist on this land they've somehow been allowed to lay claim to. We have to let go of our irrational fear of progress. Ignore the non-stop propaganda machine telling us this is all there is and all there ever can be.

  The Nureongi are far more advanced than us. Believe it. They are more evolved than us. They live richly and fully, while we rot away in unremitting misery, never knowing the simple joys of a life without restraints. Our lives are wholly lacking in substance. Success and happiness in the Orninican One World Directive is a lottery with one to a hundred million odds. Yet we continue to dance in the quicksand, choosing between the same two identical, depraved political parties again and again, until we sink a little too far into the pit and suffocate.

  It's not working. It never worked. You have to see it, the evidence is all around you. We have no liberty, no privacy, no opportunity. Secret courts and secret police and secret gag-orders abound. Whistle-blowers savagely denigrated by every media body, tortured and incarcerated, their lives forfeited. We are impoverished and oppressed, yet too stubborn to see beyond the old patriotic adage; the 'great Orninican democracy, the land of the brave and free'. Where do you see bravery? Where do you see freedom? Where is this great democracy slumbering? How can this explicit plutocracy we're governed by be mistaken for anything else?

  Are our politicians not directly funded with 'contributions' from the wealthy elite? Do corporate lobbyists not write every word of our laws, that are then passed into law by the politicians the same corporations finance? How much more obvious does this madness need to be before it's recognized by anyone not painted by society as a laughable conspiracy theorist extremist in a tinfoil hat?

  We have to let go of our dependency on the massive corporations that control every aspect of our lives. Their junky overpriced ware is used against us, to spy on us, to silence us, to numb us into indifference and unquestioning obedience. When was the last time a technology was designed to actually improve our standard of living, rather than simply to create new revenue streams for corporations?

  We can embrace free, non-commercial, open source technologies, managed by the very dogs that use them, in their own time; for the good of the community. How is this not preferred over a faceless entity only concerned with amassing greater profit and power for its shareholders?This isn't some romantic theoretical idealism, these are functional systems that continue to operate even in contemporary Orninica right now, but are marginalized, penalized, ignored and ultimately litigated into oblivion by all the 'official' channels in f
avor of closed, expensive, poorly designed commercial implementations plagued by security holes and backdoors to every government agency that wants its share of the flesh ripped from our bones.

  The patent and copyright systems need to be completely overhauled. Too often, brilliant advances in ingenuity are buried by corporations that don't want to risk changing their business model to compete with better technologies. We continue to cling to destructive, outmoded centuries-old concepts like fossil fuels, while incredible, simple alternatives like perpetual-motion, free-energy harvesters invented by amazing minds are buried by corporations for daring to endanger their lucrative monopolies.

  If our technology were liberated, every dog on the planet would have free energy harvested from the cosmos, beamed directly to their cars and homes, at an environmental and financial cost of zero.

  Yes, such innovations have been invented, and quickly bought up and locked into a vault by our dear corporate overseers. Is this not an unpardonable attack on all life? Think of the suffering that could be averted with perpetual clean energy available to everyone. Think of the advances we would make, unburdened by such crude restraints as power generation and distribution. Think of how cheap food, shelter and consumables would immediately become. The common dog could be free to travel the world as easily as a trust-fund socialite in his yacht.

  The only way to liberate ourselves from our captors is to completely demolish the intricate maze-like institutions these elite corporatists have expended so much money and energy into building up, to contain us in their circuitous reality. We must raze the old world and start anew, I am certain our future survival absolutely depends on it.