In my story I went off on a tangent about grocery stores. Y’all may be forgiven for thinking it a pointless digression but I have always been delighted with cheap plentiful food. Like a fish that can’t see water, most Americans (Westerners?) don’t notice.
Here’s a video of a grocery store in 1971. Park your ass down and look upon the mundane with new eyes:
Reflect on how amazing and miraculous such things really are. This isn’t a society recently created out of technology and unicorn subsidies. This is a society that has black and white TV. Their wall mounted telephones don’t have touch tone and long distance is expensive enough it’s reserved for special occasions. This society, 51 years ago, provided all of this food not to elites with good social scores but to average peons! The average peons drove in with big Detroit iron cars, bought as much or as little as they wanted, and drove away. This is the culmination of a society that has its shit together. Do you notice there are no police at the doors? No EBT cards? The coolers run on unlimited uninterrupted power. There are no blue haired masked freaks protesting out front. It’s normal law abiding capitalists enjoying the fruits of their labor.
This isn’t a rich people only store. This existed on the same planet where Soviet peasants waited hours to buy their allocation of bread. The food available is in greater variety and abundance than any society ever produced in all of human existence. A king in 1400 couldn’t even see this level of food. A Roman Emperor in 300 couldn’t witness it. An earthly representative of God in ancient Egypt came nowhere close. How sad that people gazed upon one of the greatest achievements in history and took a fucking hammer to it.