Punishment Without Crime

Oompah-pah music and traditional German drinking songs floated up from the street festival into the third-floor courtroom. I shifted uneasily from foot to foot as I stood before the scowling judge. One prosecution witness after another had described in specious detail my attitudes, conversations, habits, and interests. There was even testimony about the transparent Jewishness of my penis. Now it was finally my turn to speak. I had just begun when the judge interjected, “Spare us your life philosophy.” His face was grave. He studied me with cold, squinty eyes as if calculating exactly how much a person can bear.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

The Art Of Doing Nothing

NATURE SUBMISSION:

There are twelve rules of enlightenment. They cover elements of Buddhist philosophy such as proper meditation, simplicity, and a constant reflection on necessity.

It's this last part that bothers Alicia most. The more she reflects on what's truly necessary, the more she realizes that her life has lost all sense of meaning. It's enough to make her want to go live in the woods someplace like a hermit and just contemplate nature every day.

Nature wants nothing to do with Alicia's existential crisis. It doesn't care that it's meaningless. It just wants to start recomposting her as soon as possible.

From Guest Contributor Laura Stacks

A Philosophic Mind

He returned the edition of Kant to the library, unread again. He came out bearing Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” Surely he could make a last effort to master existentialism.

He decided to sit down on the bench in the high street to watch the passersby.

“How foolish they are,” he mused, “going on so unreflectively with their trivial business.”

“Not a philosophic mind amongst them,” he scoffed.

“They probably think I’m just an elderly man sitting here with nothing to do,” he surmised.

How wrong he was, for, unnoticed by the passing multitudes, no one thought about him at all.

From Guest Contributor Ian Fletcher

Art, Music, Philosophy

Our 5-year-old daughter, Celeste, was singing to herself. She suddenly stopped and said, "Why do I always fart when I sing?” Then a French farmer while plowing on a hill uncovered a rusted revolver that may be the very one Van Gogh used to shoot himself. I looked at my wife, who was looking back at me. I can’t keep drowning, I can’t. There are little children living without parents in freezing tents in detention camps. The ancient Greek stoics maintain a complicit silence. I just want it to end. Every kind of music is meant to be played loudly.From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

A Rational Rebuttal To The Philosophy Of Futility

Eric got up from his table, leaving his philosophy books sprawled across the surface. Cramming for the test at this juncture was a futile gesture. He was certain Paul Nystrom would agree, but it wouldn't help him ace this test.

He'd heard of one student from several years back who aced his finals with a single sentence. "What's the point?" He'd gotten the only A in his class.

He also knew of at least two students who tried the same trick last year, and they'd both failed.

Philosophy professors love all ideas, except the one that questions their own validity.

The Great Partition

In the early 21st century the USA conducted a second Noble Experiment, the first being 1920’s Prohibition in the USA which was often referred to as The Noble Experiment.

Now on a state-by-state basis, the USA was partitioned the into two halves: Zoned For Guns (ZFG) and No Gun Zone (NGZ).

ZFG was governed with laws to protect the right of gun ownership in all legal matters.

NGZ was governed with laws which put the right of the human being first, to the detriment of any gun, in all legal matters.

For the people who registered to live in the ZFG, it became a crime to not have in their residence, or vehicle, or within arm’s reach at all times, a firearm. This crime was punishable by jail, a fine, or both. The worst offenders faced forced relocation to the NGZ.

For the people who registered to live in the NGZ, it became a crime to possess, sell, buy or trade guns. The punishment was jail, a fine, or both. The worst offenders faced forced relocation to the ZFG.

There were chaotic scenes when the Great Partition came into effect. In places where the migrating lines ran parallel, insults were hurled which sometimes lead to fights and shootings, which kept the Partition Police busy. The gun owners blamed the non-gun people for being the cause of disruption. The non-gun owners blamed the gun people for being the cause of disruption.

There were mass voluntary relocations into each side of the Great Partition. This was helped to a large degree by families swapping equivalent houses.

The forced relocations were another matter. Fortunately the Partition Police Force had been established very early in the piece and was well trained for any contingency. This is a measure of how deeply passions ran on both sides.

Unfortunately there were the ‘stay puts’ who could not be persuaded to take part in the Great Partition voluntarily. The media played up the dramatic scenes of their forced relocations which only inflamed passions on both sides.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) remained vocal during the time of the Great Partition, gloating over what they saw as a victory in principle for their philosophy.

After the Great Partition had been established, things did not settle down to the peaceful outcome expected.

The NRA took an aggressive stance, advertising heavily on the NGZ side for people to join the ZFG side. The NGZ retaliated with a similar campaign which included a cash incentive for anyone who would move to NGZ for at least 12 months which led to what was described in the media as the Mercenaries; people for whom the cash overrode their moral compass, and defected to the NGZ, only to counter productively move back to ZFG after 12 months.

The NRA also lobbied expensively for the NGZ to modify their laws or adopt compromises closer to the ZFG stance.

The NRA then moved to the next stage, “Reunification;” the campaign for all or nothing.Today's piece is a bit off-format. Rather than exactly 100 words, this is a 500-word story from Barry O'Farrell. We'll occasionally include narratives that fall under different rules of composition. Barry's story was written in reaction to last week's tragic events in South Carolina.

Barry is an actor living in Brisbane, Australia. Barry’s other stories have appeared in Cyclamens & Swords, 50 Word Stories, and of course here at A Story in 100 Words.

Anthropology 101

You hear the droning, a high-pitched whistle that keeps interrupting your sleep. It's your anthropology professor, bombinating about some god awful theory of ethnography that can't possibly be as interesting as the dream you're having.

You hate anthropology and its awkward mixture of science and philosophy. What does Dr. Dunham have to tell you about modern-day reality.

And then you understand that life was all an illusion, that the reality may be that you are spending your last living moments in the Arctic on a scientific expedition, and as you die of exposure, the 100-mile-per-hour winds whistle in your ear.