ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Steph Myers turned off the TV.
“I thought it was moving,” his wife, Gail, said.
Steph said nothing.
“Didn’t you think so? She seemed sincere. I like her.”
Sure, she seemed sincere? They always seem sincere. That’s their job, Steph thought. They’re actors reading a script. The question we have to decode is who wrote their script.
He’d seen that phrase in the chat room 5Click and wrote it down. That’s what you had to do. Decode. Unpack. Not the way he’d been taught in school. Not even the way he taught his kids “media literacy” in his seventh grade social studies class. There was a new literacy now. And he was helping to write the curriculum, a curriculum no school had approved yet. Find your own community. Own your knowledge. Be citizens, not consumers. Read the Constitution for yourself. Recognize our country was born in revolution and will only survive in revolution. Know the militia clause.
He’d been reading things about Wendy Upton. Some of the people in chat rooms knew her in the army or the Senate. They all had questions about how David Traynor died. Not answers, not yet, but questions. Ones worth asking. About things that didn’t add up.
“Come kiss the kids good night,” Gail said.
“Okay,” Steph said. “Be right there.”