There is a particular sort of optimism required to believe that a Mixer can be rehabilitated.
Time after time, I have watched Mixers grab the hand that feeds them only to chew through the wrist. There is always another sob story dragged beneath the lights for corporate society to inspect and politely pretend is worth considering.
The fashionable explanation is that Mixers are misunderstood.
My theory is less complicated: some animals bite because biting is what they do. You do not reason with a rabid animal, hand it an employee badge and hope exposure to civilized society cures whatever is rattling around inside its skull. You put it somewhere it cannot bite anybody.
Despite my objections, New Light Media and the Withmore Justice Force tried rehabilitation anyway.
Rexxis "Wheelman" Boonehelm is a criminal element affiliated with the street gang known as the Sinners. Already carrying enough fines to reflect their chronically poor judgement, Boonehelm was reportedly sentenced to community service with New Light Media after illegally tampering with a licensing terminal at the Hall of Justice.
This City is extraordinarily generous to exactly the wrong people. A man interferes with city infrastructure, gets shot for his trouble and accumulates a criminal record thick enough to choke a clerk, and what does corporate society do? It gives him work. Not a one-way ticket to the Genetek recombination tanks. Not a skywalk swan dive. Actual honest-to-God fucking labor. Responsibility, and a chance to impersonate a productive citizen.
There are people in Red who would sell a kidney for that kind of opportunity. Meanwhile, Boonehelm found it oppressive. Like clockwork, a few days later, Media Gardens was brutally set on fire.
According to witness reports, Boonehelm was part of a group of armed Mixers moving through Gold Sector in a series of coordinated attacks. Molotov cocktails were used in multiple locations, including Media Gardens, and Judges ordered citizens away while WCS reported dutifully to prevent a mass-casualty event.
Picture this. Corporate employees providing value for their companies. Gardens maintained at considerable expense so this city retains some resemblance to a place fit for human habitation. Then a bottle comes sailing through the air full of burning fuel because somebody from Red had another fit of LnA-3z induced delusions.
And regrettably, Street Judge Severino Staley, one of Withmore's finest, was murdered during the incident in cold blood. According to the Withmore Justice Force, Abu "Harami" Bakr and another unnamed assailant attacked and killed Judge Staley. Bakr was subsequently Judged, while the identity of the second assailant remains under investigation.
The association between Bakr and Boonehelm remains unclear to me, but one thing is certain. When rabid animals are cornered, they'll try to seek numbers to increase their strength.
Fortunately, Boonehelm is as competent as a criminal as he is smart. He was Judged guilty of conspiracy to commit Judicial Homicide for his role in the attack. After interviewing the WJF, I learned that Boonehelm acted as a distraction device, occupying himself by assaulting a random bystander while the murder took place. There is something almost ironic about it: one man attacking a stranger while his associates kill a Judge nearby, the grand Mixer struggle reduced to its most honest form.
Sounds familiar? Misled Mixers following a blind cause, getting thrown into the deep end for someone's else whims of unjustified violence.
We cannot stand idle and ignore patterns. There will be people who insist for nuance here. "But Reed, Boonehelm felt mistreated! Community service bruised his dignity! He was just a poor victim of society, forced to steal to survive! We need to rehabilitate them into society!" I'm more of the school of thought that a man who insists on remaining at the bottom rung of society found honest work psychological torture.
None of these explanations matter very much to the victims. What should we tell them? What should we tell their children, brothers, and sisters?
This city has spent years constructing an entire industry around the delicate management of Mixer feelings. We are told to employ them, hear them out, give them another chance, adjust the language, commission the focus group, and ask whether the boot currently kicking us in the teeth feels sufficiently represented in the quarterly report.
Meanwhile, the corporations build the towers, pay our wages, and keep the lights on in a world where the landscape beyond the Dome walls is inhospitable. Judges stand between civilized society and the lunatics try to burn it down. And after all of that, we the corporate society are somehow still expected to apologize for having walls.
I refuse. I refuse!
There comes a point where sympathy ceases to be virtue and becomes an expensive form of stupidity. I do not see oppression here. I see squandered mercy. We're just too good for them. I see a civilization so determined to prove its compassion that it hands matches to people standing beside gasoline and acts surprised when somebody smells fire.
Boonehelm was offered a path back into civilization, like many others, and his answer was to rally up with the closest like-minded lunatics he could find, and issue fire and death to a Judge. Why were we so soft? If I was running the Law around here, I'd put them in cages and hang them over lamp posts, for the entire city to observe and bask in their shame.
Perhaps next time, we should believe the answer before our eyes.
E. ReedGlobe Reporter
