3-Minute Madness by Tommia Wright

So, decided it was time to properly focus on this thing called ‘writing.’ Not that I haven’t written (I suppose bills, to-do lists and shopping lists don’t count.), but looking at the long empty void of anything gave me a moment to pause.

Then I remembered the fun I had with NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction challenge. When did I remember this?

Three minutes before deadline.

So, didn’t send the story off, but with the timer in play, wrote a silly short-short that may or may not be the seed of development for a secondary character (somehow, this fella didn’t sound off loud/strong enough to be a primary character, but I’ve been wrong before). Definitely not much of a story to it. If anything, the only time I’ve bothered weaving in politics into a story was a) as background for a secondary character set for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo project, and b) as a surrounding circumstance for last year’s project. Otherwise, politics doesn’t mix well with my fiction (I barely mix well with it in reality).

Below – the foolish, meandering rambling:

Coin Toss

“…the president of the United States of America,” the voice on the radio said in proper, newscaster monotone. Not that Solomon Arthur Madison cared. The change of one leader to another often brought little change at all, in his opinion.

“Uncle Sam,” as the neighborhood kids called him, kept a collection of journals where he recorded the day’s events one line at a time. Whenever he grew bored with the television, radio or newspaper, he’d grab a journal at random and read. Didn’t matter the decade, the ruler – the details seemed to stay the same.

Rupert proposed change. The fellas after him did, too. Problem was there was very little spare change to go around helping make things happen. Then there were the other father-to-son exchanges of leadership. The sins of the father seemed to carry on with sins of the son – sins often paid by the population in awe of the ‘royal feel’ of the one in the Oval Office.

Nope, “Uncle Sam” didn’t see much point in going down to the polling place every election to make a selection. Yet he did it anyway, out of patriotic duty and a misplaced notion that his voice really did count for something. He was a fool when he casted his first vote; he was a fool now.

Yet he continued to hope – hope that someday, some leader would bring the country back to full prosperity, full productive contributions and all around philanthropy that was home-based first before trying to fix the rest of the world. It was a stupid hope, but one he held on to along with many other stupid habits.

The idiot box had a series of ads attacking one over the other. It seemed to him that children on the playground played better than that even after a fight.

But democracy was worth fighting for, even if it was with one’s self on which of the candidates proved worthy and best prepared to lead a nation.