old/unused detective, missing person story (excerpt)

 That church of theirs does a lot more harm than good if I'm telling the truth. Making promises you know you can't keep is bound to be wed with disaster of every variety it gets its lousy breath on and faith will prove itself as less and less when your luck is running low on the good days and is hardly a condescending rumor on the bad ones. 

It pays to be stoic. It pays to realize stoicism has more to do with confidence than faith. 

It's the sort of thing that people who're paid to give speeches & lectures tell you all the time but you don't see much of it playing a role in routine society. Maybe it was there more at the turn of the last century, when whatever excitement accompanied the construction of the railroads and was lifting towards nuclear technology and rapid advancements in telecommunication was still in its becoming, before complacency flowed in like some obligatory eighth day of the week. (I'll try to refrain from too many cliches, but it'll take an effort. 

The Church... Meredith was barely gone a week before you'd see groups of four or five or six or more gathered in front of the major grocery stores and those selfsame plaza where the old will cling to every petty distraction and the young couldn't be seriously expected to know. They held big posters with Meredith's picture with either MISSING or HAVE YOU SEEN ME? written above or below the picture. Of course, the same pictures could be found in a zillion other places on the internet so that anyone who even saw one of those kind-hearted Samaritans was as likely to not be familiar with who Meredith was as they were to not know soda came in both bottles and cans. No good deed too good for a sycophant. No tragedy a moral-bottomfeeder can't make about themselves.... 

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I'm tired. If I get a real comment I'll type the last few paragraphs or a little more. 

Mahalo. CdC