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deafening haste @deafeninghaste.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

sounds familiar. avoid the potions.

But let me teach you a little something. Did you know that after the war, the government had an excess of chemicals left over from making bombs? Did you know that after the war, they made an arrangement to increase the value of the raw chemicals, make some money off them? These are the sad truths of the world, professor. The government sold the chemicals to the farmers. As if the farmers had any use for chemicals. They worked the soil, back then. They used manure. It was simple back then. Small.

Sure, yeah, they gave farmers a great deal on a magic potion that would increase their yield while reducing the work done by men, and, by the way, at that time these were men who were in high demand. Replace man with machine, there we go. Drench the fields with a chemical to make crops grow faster and get bigger, then use a chemical to keep the weeds and bugs at bay. Just buy these chemicals and you'll see, you'll never have to work again!

And that sounded good, didn't it, because no one liked working all that much, or no one wanted to work more than they had to.
And look at you, you're smoking the same chemicals, the same ones, professor, and you think you need it, too.

The first year it went well. All the pests died, and the crops were plentiful. So, there was growth. This is how they get you, at first, with growth. The family farms grew and consolidated, and the farmers became dependent on the potions, but they were happy to be dependent. It felt like being taken care of, a country that was taking care of its people who had been through so much. But soon, the farmers couldn't farm without the potions, because without the potions there were too many pests and no way to get rid of them, and without the potions the soil was useless, because the soil had become dependent, too.

"Helen of Nowhere" by Makenna Goodman

Farmers who had been making money then went into debt paying for the treated seeds and gallons and gallons of the inputs, boxes and boxes, whole vats of it, which had originally been sold as a miracle cure, but now were being sold as the solution to what was now seen as continual disease. The companies were making new potions to answer the problems that had been created by the old potions, and the farmers bought the new potions, and the companies blamed the farmers for bad practices or bad soil or bad weather or bad work ethic. They had to work harder now, but it was all about dousing their soil, you see, the work had become all about dousing the soil and forgetting about what made the soil itself in the first place.

It was an endless parade of potions, professor. And farms were buying up other farms and there was monocropping and no one grew their own kitchen gardens anymore, everyone was reliant on selling one crop for acres and acres, all the way up to their dooryard. Subsidies were granted by the government to help farmers afford even more magic tricks. The livestock got sick from eating grain because of the chemicals in the grain eating away al their gut. "But cows get sick," said the companies, and they gave the cows medicine that was made by the industry that had extra antibiotics it needed to sell, which were made from some of the same chemicals. "Just give the cows this medicine," the companies said, and the animals took the medicine and became resistant to it and got sick again and took more, higher doses, new compounds made by those companies, or by their sister companies.

"Helen of Nowhere" by Makenna Goodman

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