Don’t Buy the Hype:
Boycott Fear Merchants and Angermongers
Just One Guy’s Opinion Around Town By Guy Zetta
May 16, 2025 — Lemme tell you something about Orange Forest that the chattering classes won’t admit over their artisanal Jolly Coffy gigantes and Sugar Glider silkworm gloop plates: Us Orangeforesters are a helluva lot tougher than we look, and a helluva lot smarter than they think.
The fear merchants and angermongers want you to believe we're one crisis away from total breakdown. They're hawking newspapers and generating clicks by convincing you that civilization is hanging by a thread. But take a walk through the parts of the City they don't show on the evening news, in Bardsley and Cantfall, and you'll see something different: people going to work, kids playing in parks, businesses opening their doors, and communities putting community first by taking care of their own.
Look. I’ve been ambling these streets for triple-aught years, watching neighborhoods rise and fall like hemlines. And I can tell you this much. We Orangeforesters have a stubborn passion, the likes of which history has never seen.
Sure. We’ve had our problems. Show me a City that hasn’t. But while every bum and his mother have been wringing their hands and spinning their heads about the supposed breakdown of civil society, something much more interesting has been bubbling under the surface. Orange Forest is quietly rebuilding itself. It’s healing.
A prime example is our newest civic ornament, the magnificent 8-foot porphyry statue of the late Quincy Forbin Jambres Junior, which was just erected in front of Orforcorp Worldheadquarters. Carved from that deep red stone the Romans reserved for emperors, it cost the company a fortune, I’m sure. But I’d say every penny was worth it for the message it sends.
See. I have it on good authority that Quincy Forbin Jambres Junior commissioned the statue long before he sadly (and mysteriously) moved on while still thriving in the prime of life at a spry 99 years old. But. Those lazy bums in that Flaggist [NAME_STRING_CORRECTION: ∞∇0I̶D̶∇∞] Vexer enseatment, sitting day in and night out with hand-painted signs and their righteous indignation in front of Orforcorp HQ, delayed the statue’s erection and official unveiling ceremony. Blocking foot traffic and making a mockery of the public right of way, the Flaggists [NAME_STRING_CORRECTION: ∞∇0I̶D̶∇∞] Vexers thought they were David facing down Goliath. Turns out? They were just a minor municipal headache with delusions of eternal laziness.
Sure. Orforcorp could’ve waited them out longer. Could’ve negotiated an end to the silly protest. Could’ve even done what every other spineless corporation does nowadays and sent out a PR rep to apologize and promise to “do better,” just to save some face.
When the brave Orange Forest Law Enforcement Corps enforcers finally moved in to clear the enseatment, professionally, efficiently, and with minimal fuss, the statue was waiting in the wings. Overnight, the company planted the porphyry monument smackdab where the protesters had been seated to serve as a permanent reminder that while protesters come and go, institutions endure.
Backing Up The Boys In Black Taking Back The Backalleys
Speaking of the Orange Forest Law Enforcement Corps. The mighty OFLEC. The boys in black. Let the talking heads debate “militarization” and the morning radio hosts clutch their pearls about “excessive force.” I’ve seen our boys in black adapt with the kind of practical wisdom that would make our grandfathers proud. The ever-forward-thinking Corps is simply practicing standard modern policing in an increasingly complex world. Which, incidentally, involves obtaining military-grade equipment to ensure OFLEC enforcers aren’t stuck bringing butter knives to bazooka fights.
But. It’s not just the boys in black growing a new backbone. Private security firms have been quietly professionalizing their operations and compiling “strategic reserves” of equipment, personnel, and intelligence. I know what you’re thinking. But these aren’t weekend warriors and mall cops playing dress-up. These are hardened professionals who understand the old mantra, “When things go sideways, I gotta do things my ways.”
Even ordinary citizens are taking responsibility into their own hands. Literally. Handgun and rifle sales have skyrocketed. My FOIA request to City Grande Hall showed the City Clerk is processing concealed carry permits at a record pace. And community watch groups are forming and actually watching their communities instead of just gossiping over potlucks.
Of course, not every community has seen such neighborly respect through vigilance.
No ZZZ’s in NoZa for the Wicked
In the North Zembla (NoZa) neighborhood, my old stomping grounds have become the breeding grounds for lunatics, radicals, and rubblebunkers.
The City’s “Remodeling the Model City” plan for NoZa was simple in its brilliance: tear down the old and build the new better. After the deconstruction phase, there was a slight pause so the City could host its wildly successful Parkour Pro Tour stop, and then the reconstruction phase would begin.
But nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. This applies to human nature, too.
Using subterfuge and sabotage, Balarabe Zulkazan and his Jubileeist followers scurried into the abandoned NoZa neighborhood like backalley rats taking over a dumpster full of rubble and rebar.
Don’t get me started on this Committee on Public Safety Factor Force (COPUSAFAFO), or that Publicopus scam, and its subcontracted workers, the so-called Subwokos. Okay. Too late. You got me started. So, this semi-forced labor program Zulkazan implemented as a last-ditch effort to control the masses has been about as effective as you'd expect from a policy dreamed up by a man who made a career out of getting clobbered in local elections and who most likely never held a shovel in his life.
From what I’ve heard in dozens of on-the-street interviews from Orangeforesters across the City, in Bardsley and Cantfall, what Zulkazan calls "community service," they call vagabondage. I listened to family after family describing how they lost their children, first to sitting with the do-nothing Flaggists [NAME_STRING_CORRECTION: ∞∇0I̶D̶∇∞] Vexers and then to being brainwashed into joining a barely disguised labor-doomsday cult that produces more resentment than results.
These sources also claim that the NoZa Subwokos are arming the Rock Club with the gang’s preferred projectile munitions. Reports continue to come in about the violent anarchist Rock Club employing guerrilla-style tactics, mainly relying on the bountiful rocks, rubble, and debris available in NoZa. Make no mistake, these Rock Clubbers are tactical thinkers who've turned NoZa’s abundant supply of construction debris into a strategic advantage. Every broken brick, every chunk of concrete, every piece of rebar becomes deadly ammunition in their hands.
On top of all these terrifying developments, recent reports from NoZa show that these poor Subwoko saps are blowing themselves up in unsuccessful attempts to build bombs.
Yup. It’s true. And nope. You won’t catch me dead in a place like that.
The protesters who thought they could pressure a major corporation into submission are gone. But the statue remains. These dumbdorko Subwoko subrevolutionaries who think they're building something permanent in NoZa are really just making a mess we’ll all eventually have to clean up. And our children and children’s children will have to clean up.
Orange Forest has survived urban renewal disasters, natural disasters, accidental industrial disasters, protest movement after protest movement after protest movement, corporate conflicts of succession, economic upheavals, and countless predictions of its imminent collapse. We'll survive this, too. Not because we're particularly heroic. Because we're particularly stubborn. And sometimes, in a world full of people who mistake noise for substance and disruption for progress, stubbornness is precisely what we need.
We're not perfect. But we're sure as hell not afraid. That porphyry statue of Quincy Forbin Jambres Junior is proof enough of that fact. Garbed in his ceremonial Grande Bonaparte uniform, the 8-foot statue stands guard like an eternally stubborn sentinel, overseeing Orange Forest’s progress to its Goal while watching neighborhoods rise and fall like hemlines.
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