Silence Will Indeed Be Golden

IN THE FUTURE, it will be very noisy with all the new people nature has created, all the new machines humankind has created, and all the complaining about the emotionally draining and spiritual deadening nature of constantly trying to force one's way through oceans of similarly frustrated and simultaneously complaining bodies.

Those few individuals who will have moved into the less-populated areas and will be enjoying their quiet lives will really irritate the majority of citizens who will be forced to live in these monstrous cities of the future.

Government (which will be world government at this point) will decide to take advantage of this via legislative demagoguery, and will create several very stiff taxes on silence.

A device will be created which measures loudness and duration of noise and several of these "dissonometers" will be placed around the dwellings of all citizens. Most importantly, each citizen will be chipped with a tiny dissonometer which will measure their exposure to noise throughout their day on their travels. City-dwellers who happen to somehow avoid being exposed to the aggravation of noise will not be immune to this tax.

Citizens will come up with schemes to try to expose their dissonometer to noise without being physically present and suffering the effects of the noise themselves, but these criminals will have their sentences handed down by a draconian hand. "Silence offenders" will be housed in separate parts of correctional facilities the same way child molestors are today, and for the same reason; the general inmate population would tear them to pieces.

Silence will become a new status symbol and most travel brochures and magazines appealing to the tastes of the wealthy will adapt silence as the sexiest of commodities, and sure sign of having "made it." A popular come on line a few centuries hence will be, "My hush or yours?" Also, citizens will be heard to repeat the adage, "Zoom! zoom! zoom! gets you a quiet room." This is roughly the equivalent of the present day, "The early bird gets the worm."

In the future, death will be seen as almost attractive, for all the silence it will hold.

It will be called, "mouthless place" and "the promised hush" and sometimes "the paradise of Shhhhh!."