“The Right of the Citizens to gather in Complaint shall not be abridged, except in Cases where such Complaints demonstrably and unequivocally evince a threat to the Union, its Property, or those in its Domain.”
—Amendment II to the Constitution of Meeting Tribes of Immediate Siblings
Not only did the Army of the Friendship cross the gorge, but they did so decisively and with minimal casualties. After the battle, there was no account of a single Union soldier from the Twelfth or Nineteenth Manehattan, or the First Canterlot Volunteer Infantry Regiment. None had been able to draw up a post-mission debrief. There was no concussed private to crawl her way back to the president. In fact, the only evidence that a battle had even taken place was that the Union Army scouts could see the Friendship marching inexorably on to Fillydelphia, each soldier armed, equipped, and in perfect formation. The only difference in the scouts’ reports this time was that only a few of the soldiers had the gray uniform with the red stripe; the majority were walking naked.
When the report got to the desk of the brigadier general responsible for that section of the war, she gave it to her supervising major general, who determined that his lieutenant general needed to have it, and the lieutenant general got to see General Sherbert’s mouth hit her desk when he gave it to her personally.
The regiments at the gorge had every conceivable military advantage going from them, and all they needed to do was to stop them to end the rebellion. How was this possible? Those positions, those fortifications, that training—and not only a decisive defeat, but a defeat with one hundred percent losses?
The lieutenant general told her that he would make sure that the regiments around Fillydelphia and Ponyville were duly informed, and then he advised her to keep the defeat a secret as long as possible, as the general opinion was that the Union had a firm hold on the war; and, with the report of a decisive defeat, the riots that would ensue in the cities still loyal to the Union was the last thing they needed.
General Sherbert thanked him and then ordered that the number of military recruitment campaigns be increased in Baltimare and Manehattan. Then she gave a sigh of dejection, exasperated that this little impotent order was the only thing she could add to the war effort.
What was certain was that the Second and Third Los Pegasus Regiments of Friends’ numbers had tripled, for they had absorbed every single surviving member of the federal regiments stationed at the gorge, as the Friendship had done in the first engagement in the crisis. To General Sherbert, this was troubling, not to mention unthinkable: over the explosion of the cannons, over the orders shouted to the rifleponies, what possible argument, what possible rhetoric, could have convinced eight thousand soldiers to go back on their oath to uphold the COMTOIS? How could eight thousand ponies who, before, were singing “The Good Fight for the Union” at the top of their lungs, suddenly betray everything they had devoted their lives to?
She had to, in spite of herself, believe that the Friendship was not one of those last-minute ad hoc movements formed out of the naive and foolish minds of university students: They were smart, and they knew what they were doing. They knew they could not take on the Union Army with force, so they turned to a weapon that the Union Army had failed to train their soldiers against, a weapon that the soldiers were taught was inferior to the rifle despite the fact that General Sherbert knew very well that it was more powerful than a bullet could ever be: persuasion.
She had a letter sent to the president containing her thoughts and which found itself sitting in a small shelf on Enforcer’s desk labeled “IN” on the very next day.
But, on the morning of that day, when Enforcer walked into the Presidential Mansion and, after taking one look around, saw the desolation in the few unhappy faces looking back at him, he did something on that day that he had never done before: he took it off.
He went to the pub down the street: the pub where he used to gather with his colleagues—and, on rare occasions, a president—on Friday nights. He had not been here ever since the first day of the conflict, when he had woken up and found that he had not wanted to go to work. The pub on Friday nights was supposed to be a celebration of a good hard week of work; and, since the beginning of the war, he had not felt that any of his work—save for that little spark of happiness he had felt when he had arranged the decorations for the celebration of a war song—had truly been good in the strictest sense of the word.
After he had opened the door to the pub, the light of the morning sun shone through, cutting a path through the dim atmosphere of the bar, and he saw the face of an early drinker squinting at him from her stupor. When Enforcer saw the pallor of her face and the blank look that accompanied it, he felt a shudder run through his entire body. When her eyes locked with his, Enforcer gasped. This pony who, on a normal day, he would have glanced away from, was now quickly becoming the archetypal being in his life; it was only now that Enforcer realized that this state was the norm, and his state—still full of life and ambition—was the aberration. To see this creature, in the pub in the morning, with nothing more to live for, with no purpose to guide her life, terrified him . . . the sight was too prescient.
“Hey! Thou are in here early!” A voice freed Enforcer from the trance that the wanderer had trapped him in. He looked in its direction, smiled in salutation to the bartender and in thanks to him for saving him, but the smile disappeared when Enforcer did not recognize his face.
The bartender was a beet red earth-pony, and the clean apron he wore showed that he had not been employed long. He was wiping a mug with an equally clean cloth in methodical circles, and twenty or thirty polished ones were sitting on the counter in front of him. The bartender had a different face than the one that was usually there; but its grin, with its perfect row of teeth, conveyed energy; and naturally, in his unenergetic state, Enforcer gravitated toward it.
“Hello,” Enforcer said back. “I’m just wondering—where’s Barley?”
“Who? Oh, thou mean the other guy?” the bartender replied. “Didn’t thou know? He’s in the Twenty-First Canterlot. Poor guy, I hope he comes back alright.”
“Oh . . . that’s a shame . . .” said Enforcer, as he sat down on one of the stools and slumped his head down on the counter.
“What can I get thee?”
Enforcer lifted his face from the counter, his mane full of static electricity and clinging to his face. “Hmm?” he murmured. He heard the bartender give a hearty laugh; Enforcer used a forehoof to part the hair away from his eyes, saw the manner and pose in which the bartender laughed, and he could not help but break a smile.
“Thou are not a morning pony, I see!” the bartender bellowed.
“No, no, I . . . I think I am. I’m pretty sure I am,” Enforcer replied, the smile draining from his face.
“Well, I know just what to make for that,” said the bartender, appearing to ignore the response and grabbing a few bottles that stood behind him. “Ponies say that this shouldn’t be drank in the morning, but to them I say . . . I say . . .” The bartender scratched his chin with his free hoof. “Well, I say something, and it was really clever; I just can’t think of it now,” he said the best he could with the bottle corks in his mouth.
Enforcer chuckled. The bartender had a certain kind of charm, just like Barley. He wondered if Barley, after spending months in the infantry, still had it.
The bartender slid a foaming wooden mug across the counter to Enforcer. The latter took a sniff, which resulted in him wrinkling his nose and squinting his eyes.
“So, trying to avoid thy job then?” the bartender asked. “Do thou really hate it that much?”
“No, I love my job—at least . . . at least I think I do. I’m not sure . . .” Enforcer took the mug in his hoof and took a sip. It was strong and had a sour, unpleasant taste. He took a breath and downed the entire pint in ten seconds, without a single drop running down his chin.
“Whoa, Nellie!” the bartender exclaimed. “How was it?”
“Rancid, awful, literally the worst drink I’ve ever had in my entire life,” replied Enforcer, sticking his tongue in and out, while squinting his eyes.
“That’s pub-talk for ‘more please.’ And by the look of thee, thou need it, old-timer,” sniggered the bartender, and he started to pour another drink, having anticipated the event and not having returned the corks to their bottles.
Enforcer eyes snapped to as he realized the horror in that seemingly harmless remark: despite being well into the years that would classify him as a senior pony, this was the first time he had ever been called old.
“So what exactly do thou do?”
“What?” said Enforcer, rubbing his right temple with a forehoof and rubbing his eyes with the other. “Oh, I work in the Presidential Mansion.”
“Ha! So thou work for Discord then?”
Enforcer used to laugh along with the president at this name, but whether it was the effects of the drink or the inappropriate context of the comment, he found no humor in it. “Yes . . . yes I work for—” he paused, as his mind trailed, trying to collect the thought that had slipped away from him, “for ‘Discord.’”
“And how’s that working out for thee?” the bartender said, as he slid the mug refilled with that repulsive fluid across the table. It bumped into Enforcer’s lifeless forehoof spread out on the counter, which imperceptibly twitched before slowly reaching up to the handle and attaching its weak grip to it.
“I worked there for the past five administrations. I was there for the Great Recession and the National Banking Crisis. I was diligent, loyal, and hard-working. There had never been a president who did not respect me and appreciate my work, and there was no president toward whom I did not feel the same way. But now . . . with this administration, and with this conflict . . . for the first time ever, I actually feel old.”
He put a hoof into his mane; and, as if to drive the point home, it emerged holding a rather large clump of pure white hair. He stared at it intently and in shock—until a breeze, coming from the door which he had carelessly left open, blew it away into a corner of the pub.
The bartender’s smile faded slightly, but it quickly came back—though not quite with the same feeling—as he tried to shrug off the comment and the unnerving event he had just witnessed with another one of his cheeky jokes: “Well, we all feel old eventually.”
“You—thou,” Enforcer said as he loosened his necktie, the drink beginning to take a hold of him, “thou do not understand.” Enforcer looked straight into the bartender’s eyes until the latter’s mouth turned into an expression of absolute dread. “I broke my hip the other day.”
“Do thou see? Thy job is killing thee. Thou should retire—” At this, the bartender put a hoof over his mouth and gasped. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to imply that thou should desert thy post in a time of crisis! I didn’t mean it like that! Please don’t tell the police! With all the arrests that have been going on, I’ve been watching what I’ve been saying—really, I have!”
Just like Barley’s, even the bartender’s fear was melodramatic, like he was doing it on purpose, and Enforcer could not help but smile. Then he caught himself and, allowing his mind to analyze the situation objectively, he realized that after he had not found any humor in the bartender’s previous attempt to be funny, he had found humor in the fact that the poor colt was terrified. He shook his head, trying to evade this thought, and said: “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anypony.” Then, quickly changing the subject he said: “But what about thee? I’m sick of talking about me. Surely thou do not want to be here forever? What are thy dreams and aspirations?” This last sentence was more of a plea than an item of small talk: a plea for some evidence of life.
The bartender froze and looked at him with a blank stare.
Enforcer, desperate, said: “I’m Enforcer. What’s thy name?”
“My name?” said the bartender, his voice dropping in volume and intensity. “It’s insipid, really, and I don’t like going by it. I’ve jumped from nickname to nickname through my life. Nowadays, my friends, especially the ones down on Mane Street, the ones who frequent the stock exchange, call me ‘Doctor.’”
“Why do they call thee that?” said Enforcer, just as he began to sip from the overflowing mug.
“They’re making fun of me. They’re teasing me for the fact that I’m waiting tables with an MBA and a PhD in economics from the University of Canterlot.”
Enforcer found a reason to spit out the disgusting liquid that he had been holding in his mouth and had been too scared to swallow. “What!” he exclaimed. “Why on earth are thou here?”
Doctor shrugged. “It’s a long and dull sob story; and I think that the last thing thou want to hear, especially this early in the morning, is some young rascal complaining to thee about his life problems.”
“Please, tell me!” Enforcer whined, sitting on the edge of his seat, his fatigue suddenly gone.
Doctor winced and set his cloth down on the counter. Leaning closer to Enforcer, he said: “Well—is this just between thee and me?”
“Of course!”
Doctor cast a wistful glance around himself, and his eyes started to droop with sadness as the painful memories came flowing back to him; they, swiftly and effortlessly, flooded through his body, destroying his false air of happiness, wiping off the affected and evasive smile on his face, and slouching his confident and cheerful shoulders. “Before, I really wanted to be one of those great Canterlot bankers one sees on Mane Street: a self-made businesspony basking in my wealth that I had rightfully earned and tossing aside any leech who dared to try to stop me. That’s what I had always wanted to be, ever since I was a colt: the king of the exchange, the champion of business, the conqueror of the market and my world.
“I invested all my time into pursuing that goal, spent too many years in the make-work courses that they made me take in my university program, until I realized, by the time I had earned my MBA, that that was not really what I wanted to do—and I felt terrible. But I had sunk too much time into that degree, and if I had stopped my career at that point, that would’ve been admitting that I had made a mistake and that I had lost years that I would never get back. Ironically enough, I had learned in one of my courses that I did not hate so much that this was known as the ‘sunk-cost bias,’ but what did I listen? Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say.
“So, I pursued my PhD: two long years of mind-numbing and grueling study and an additional two years of writing my thesis. The more research I did, the more time I wasted, the more I realized that I hated what I was doing.
“When I stood in front of the dissertation committee, after speaking for hours from a mindless chart that I had memorized for all of the standardized questions that they would ask and after they had told me that I had successfully defended my thesis, I broke down into tears. They all applauded, for they thought that I was overcome with joy; but, in truth, never had my tears been more filled with sorrow.
“What did I have after all that? What was my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? A title and a piece of paper that said I was an expert in something that I did not care for, and nothing more. I started to receive calls from universities and banking firms, offering me quite well-paying jobs, but the more they offered, the worst I felt; for, at this point, I knew that any piece of gold they would give me would look as smudged as how I viewed myself.
“My parents were outraged, of course. They told me that they had expected me to do something with my life to justify the enormous amount of money in tuition that they had sunk into me. I told them that it wasn’t a waste, for university taught me who I was and taught me that I still had a lot of growing to do. They didn’t care. They kicked me out and told me to fend for myself.
“In my destitution, I came into here and sat down on one of these stools—come to think of it, it’s the exact same stool thou are sitting on right now. After I had too much to drink, I guess I had spewed my entire life story, and the bartender—Barley did you say his name was? I’m not good with names—told me that I could take the quiet hours, the hours that are the most unpleasant to work, if I so desired. I guess he was looking for somepony who was at rock bottom, who would take anything given to him, but when he said this, I felt my insides surge with a profound happiness. I don’t really know why, to be honest.
“Funny that thou should ask me if I wanted to be here forever: I thought I did want to, for a longer time than I would care to admit; but after I saw the protest and after I saw the Friendship—or the rebellion, if thou prefer—with no supplies, surviving by feeding off the land, I now know exactly what I want to do: I just want to wait until the war is over and then go walking across Equestria, living off the land as they did.” Doctor shrugged, leaned both of his forelegs on the table, and rested his head on his hooves, a pensive sigh coming from his throat. “Have thou ever, on the outside, denounced some misfortune occurring to somepony else but, at the same time, were secretly happy about it?”
“Recently, I have, yes.”
“I love abandoned buildings, because they’re so eerie and sad. They used to be bustling with life; but now, the only life there is ghosts, the only evidence of whom is a few crumbling walls and tell-tale appliances. Well, with the war that’s wrecking the land, the Friendship burning and pillaging villages, on their way to whatever big city they want, there will be dilapidated settlements all over the place. I can’t wait to just go out and live for a few days in a burnt out shed and then moving on to the next house, the next lost story.”
Enforcer felt tears swelling in his eyes as he tried to swallow the lump in his throat.
“Oh, but I’m sorry!” replied Doctor, clearly misinterpreting Enforcer’s sniffling as anger. “I shouldn’t have said that! How inappropriate of me to speak any thoughts that are anti-Union! I’m nothing but patriotic to this great country. The Union forever!” Doctor blushed. “Of course, my patriotism is undoubtedly dwarfed by thine.”
Enforcer shook his head sadly. “I don’t even know what that word means anymore.”
Doctor cocked his head to one side. “What do thou mean?”
Enforcer’s eyes glazed over as he began searching the recesses of his memory. He summoned all his will, all his courage to convert the abstract thoughts that had been swirling around in his consciousness for months into words, so that he may vocalize them for the first time. The words felt strange on his tongue when they first started to come out; but then, like a siphon that has been given the initial amount of energy it needs, they began to flow on their own accord: “I used to think that patriotism meant sticking by thy country, thy leader, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what loyalties changed. For a time, during my early years, the ponies I had surrounded myself with were so profoundly moral that it would have been a betrayal to myself had I not met their expectations.
“Thou are probably too young to remember the Changeling War, but it’s still fresh in my mind. I was in the same position I was in now—that is to say, presidential assistant—with President Heartfelt, who had been the leader of the Royal Party before it had won and he succeeded to the presidency.
“When the changeling swarm had invaded our borders through Los Pegasus, there were so many of them that they had blocked out the sun; day had become night. I don’t want to blame the citizens of Los Pegasus; but when the changelings first appeared and President Heartfelt had warned the residents of the city to err on the side of caution, they, in their constant efforts to act contrary to the federal government, started to feed them and let them into their homes. Their gestures proved to be counter-productive; because, as soon as the changelings had found what they wanted, they were ravenous, ripping at any building, any structure they could find in search of their food.
“I was there when Congress called the emergency session, and I was there when I saw the abject cowardice and appeasement that the delegates belonging to the United Party showed during the debates that had followed: Evading the fact that Los Pegasus, that beautiful city with its heroic monuments and magnificent buildings, lay in debris while still being fed upon, they criticized President Heartfelt for exhibiting ‘The elitism of the pre-Union days,’ for being quick to take to ‘extremes.’ They suggested that the Union was flexible and that all should be permitted to join, regardless of lifestyle or eating habits—and that accommodations should be made. I envy that time, as that was when I was so sure of evil when I saw it. The reason why was on the tip of my tongue; I had it conceptualized, but I couldn’t put it into words. I had asked President Heartfelt if he knew what I was talking about.
“‘Yes,’ he said to me.
“‘But I don’t know how to explain it!’ I replied. ‘I’m not exactly a poet, but I know it’s wrong. I know that it’s implicit in our beings and in our Union that it’s the most unspeakably evil thing that I’ve ever heard. Can you explain it, sir?’
“‘I’m working on it,’ he said.
“‘When will you be done?’ I said, with my youthful impatience.
“‘I’m not sure,’ he said, and in his tone I could hear discomfiture, a quality unbecoming of a leader and which he usually prudently kept hidden, except from the ones he trusted the most.
“‘But I know that emotions are meaningless without the proper reason behind them,’ he went on. ‘I know that there is a reason; I just don’t know what it is. But I do know that until one of us figures it out, we’ll never be able to save our home.’
“Eventually, after a needlessly long struggle, he got Equestria to declare war on the invaders. To this day I still remember how lucky Equestria was that the Royalists dominated Congress back then; if the bickering had continued any longer, we would’ve surely been overrun.
“I was standing beside President Heartfelt when he addressed the frightened throng of ponies who had gathered outside of Hall of Congress, begging for assurance. We had read the speech that was written for him, together, and we were both disappointed by it. I asked him if I should ask the writers to write another one, or if I should write it myself. He shook his head sadly and said that the ponies were looking for a benevolent savior to lead them to their salvation, somepony who he could not, in his ability, be. A speech more assuring than the one that I had been holding couldn’t be written.
“On the day when he was supposed to give the speech, he walked out onto the podium to a thousand destitute faces, and he was not greeted with the applause that is typical when the president makes his appearance. And who could blame them? A good number of them had all their possessions destroyed by the swarm and were on the brink of starvation. I was shaking with fear. I thought that the president was attempting to swim to a drowning, helpless pony in an effort to give him a life-raft; and I thought that was only going to result in the pony grabbing him, overpowering him, and dragging him down into the dark sea with him.
“As I took my place in the pit underneath the stage, so that I wouldn’t be seen by the public, I watched the president walk onto the stage—and the first thing I noted was the most serene of looks on his face.
“I was shocked. For the leader of a country that had just been decimated by a foreign invasion that wasn’t too far away and who was about to assure his citizens, possibly falsely, that everything would be alright, and for him to walk out with such confidence put me into a state of awe. His expression was almost sublime.
“I held out my shaky hoof with the cue cards that held the text of the speech, and I saw him put on his glasses. He then started his speech; and, at the first sentence, I knew something was wrong: out of caprice or out of deliberate planning, he had abandoned the speech entirely. I tossed away the notes, looked up to the stage, and I listened to that speech. I will never forget that speech for as long as I live.”
“What was so special about it?” asked Doctor, with both his forehooves on the table, riveted to the story.
“Because never, in the five terms in which I’ve worked, have I ever heard something so presidential, so just, so inspiring, and so moral. There were no platitudes, or those promises which politicians make when they’re running for office but never follow through with; all there was was a stallion, who hid his fear so expertly, telling the ponies he had under his ward why they shouldn’t fear the upcoming war. And, when he was done, nopony did fear it. The philosophical base on which he had built his administration and on which he was about to defend his country could never be brought down, despite the power of any enemies that wished to see its destruction.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Enforcer replied, a lie, as after the speech had taken place, he had gotten the transcript and read it until it was memorized. “But, in a nutshell, this is what he said: He said that, after Unification, the founders wanted their creation, the result of their efforts in order to stop conflict, to remain standing, for ponies to live free and in harmony with each other until the end of time.
“A union is difficult. It requires some concessions, some compromise, and there would always be some occasional bickering. But one thing was for sure: Every single pony, who agreed to live under the Union, adhered to the same principles. Even though they may have day-to-day disagreements with each other, each pony had one ultimate principle implicit in every single one of their actions—a principle which was implicit during Unification and a principle which the founders tried their best to ratify in the COMTOIS: the principle that life is good and it should be carried out in harmony—that it deserves to be carried out in harmony. This was why the founders decided to end their feud and form the Union: as long as each and everypony carried this tenet in their hearts, the Union—and therefore, harmony—would be perennial.
“He explained this; and whether he had figured this out well in advance or he had deduced the conclusion on the spot by simply vocalizing his premises, I’ll never know, but he had done it. He had figured out why any opposition to an immediate retaliation that resulted in either an unconditional surrender or a complete extermination of the changeling species was more destructive to Equestria than the changelings could ever be: because it was the idea that we should compromise with a species that, by its very nature, survived by killing us. It was the notion that the ideal state was the middle ground between death and life. I knew that the ponies that held that idea were exponentially more dangerous than the changelings who, having just razed Los Pegasus, were beginning to multiply and spread out across the land.
“Thus, this creature, this parasite, which only carried death and destruction in its wake could not be permitted to the Union: It rejected the founders’ basic principle. It rejected that life and its corollary, freedom from fear of harm, were desirable. Our guiding principle was to live; their principle was to exterminate that life.
“When the president finished this speech, I looked at those emaciated faces in the crowd, and I would have never have thought that they would have had that much energy to applaud so loudly. The president’s eyes twinkled with valor and majesty as he lifted his head up, raised his hoof in the traditional military salute, and shouted ‘The Union forever!’ three times. After each time he said this, the crowd, along with myself, repeated after him in our loudest voices. It was so loud that, later, we learned that we could be heard from Ponyville. We shouted this until we had worn out our vocal chords, and I joined them. In that moment, I understood the full meaning of that phrase and its implication more so than I had ever in any point in my entire life.
“The next day, the Union Army was dispatched to fight, armed with state-of-the-art technology and weaponry specially designed to fight the changelings, and the swarm was gone within a month. The Union Army suffered very few casualties, while the swarm was pretty much wiped out. With the philosophy finally worded and riding on their shoulders, nothing but a decisive victory was possible. The soldiers were welcomed home as heroes; President Heartfelt was dubbed a ‘visionary’ and was elected to three more consecutive terms, and he would’ve been elected to three more had he not retired.”
Enforcer chuckled. “This is going to sound really strange coming from a worker employed by a republic for over forty years: but after President Heartfelt, I really started to look up to the royal family and nobility in general. He was, as thou probably know, Prince Heartfelt before he was elected. We stayed good friends afterwards, and he invited me to many gatherings of the cream of Canterlot’s crop, hosted by his family.
I loved watching how the nobles carried themselves. They really seemed, to me, to be the way we all should act, the ponies that we should all aspire to be like. I loved how they would refer to themselves in the third-person when addressing us commoners. When I saw a pony greet them with a bow, accompanied by a ‘Your Grace,’ which would be responded to with the most pleasant of smiles, my heart fluttered with joy on the wonderfulness of this encounter. When I would walk home on those nights and see how the majority of ponies, even those in the upper middle-class, carried themselves, it would make me feel very disappointed and sad—like I had stepped out from a sublime, colorful, peaceful dream, and back into the real world consisting of mediocrity and rudeness. The highlights of my life were always those social gatherings, which I sadly had stopped being invited to ever since President Heartfelt died ten years ago.
“I miss him terribly. Nowadays, when I walk down the hallways of the Presidential Mansion, I stop at the portrait of President Heartfelt outside the western drawing room. I see him smiling back at me, and then I look at the portraits of the founders around him—and I can’t help but feel that they, with everything just and good about them, had been reincarnated in him.”
Enforcer sighed and looked up from his drink, which he had been staring at for the past ten minutes and looked straight into the eyes of Doctor—who, while still listening attentively, started to pour another drink.
Enforcer continued: “President Cadenza was one of those nobles. When she was found guilty after her impeachment, my heart flutters, which had continued even after President Heartfelt’s death, stopped. If she was undesirable, what else did Equestria have left? Well, we had the leader of the United Party, Disce Cordis. At first, I really liked him: he had that attitude of austerity and certitude that I had felt when I had read the COMTOIS for the first time. Like President Heartfelt, he had the will to stand up for what he believed to be right even in the face of dissent and contradiction.
“I was shocked to my core when I heard how he insulted Princess Celestia, to whom I had talked to on plenty occasions and who was no less regal than any of her kin, and her family in front of all those ponies. He wasn’t wrong, but the royal family has its roots in the founding of Equestria and has a presence in virtually every single event in the history of this country. I felt that it was a slap in the face of everything good in Equestria.”
“So, why do thou think he won?” Doctor asked, putting the corks back into the bottles—a frothy mug awaiting himself as soon as Enforcer was finished.
“He was extreme, vocal, and audacious. Given Equestria’s state at the time, one can easily see why they’d want a radical, new thinker—or, rather, why they’d want someone who spoke as if he was a radical, new thinker. Of course, there are always two sides in a spectrum; and, however extreme he was, there were others who were just as extreme as him. This resulted in the protest and, as thou know, the war.
“It wasn’t until I saw the way he conducted a war that my illusion of him was destroyed. I tell thee: when I sat with him and he told us, with brutal coldness in his voice, his plan to fight the rebellion, I could feel the blood in my veins turning to ice. This isn’t to imply that war or its planning should not be cold. It’s just that, I saw the miserable faces of the protesters that started the movement; I saw with my own eyes the chaos in Ponyville, and I saw the ponies there grasping onto their last strains of life. What terrified me, even if I might not have been able to explain it then, was the fact that the president enacted this plan while all claiming it was for the benefit of the Union. Nothing in the eyes of the war’s victims made me think that they were a life-destroying changeling horde; all I saw were ponies desperately clinging on to the last remains of their life and struggling against an incomprehensible horror in the hopes of a better future.
“It shattered my illusion of the founders’ idea of the perfect union: here, we have ponies whose principles are identical to thine and mine. They don’t want to destroy this country because they’re parasites and destruction per se is their modus operandi; they’re fighting because they believe that they can make the Union better. They believe they can improve the Union, because they love the Union. Don’t get me wrong; I still think that their actions are rash and unnecessary, but they’re ponies, just like thee and me. They’re not changelings.
“So, what does ‘patriotism’ mean? Does it mean fighting for the spirit that the founders had when they united us? Or does it mean interpreting the COMTOIS literally, without context? The president swore to uphold the COMTOIS, so I guess I can’t really fault him for declaring the secession illegal, but the thing that bothers is how righteous and nonchalant he is about it: he paints them as these diabolical, life-destroying monsters, and he seems to enjoy watching their lives being stomped out, like he’s simply a vessel for justice. I used to have that simplistic view of the world, like him, but now when I look back, it horrifies me.”
Enforcer sighed while he looked wistfully around the room. Then, his eyes snapped back to those of Doctor.
Doctor gave a melancholic smile, grabbed the mug with his hoof and raised it in a toast. “To whatever may come,” he said.
Enforcer lifted his own mug. “The Union fore—” he began, but then he stopped himself short. His eyes darted around the room again, while looking for different words, before finally finding their place back onto the friendly face of Doctor. “To justice—to a better future.” He downed the putrid beverage in a single gulp.
After several more drinks, Enforcer noted that it was well into the afternoon. Even in his current state, he was determined to make an appearance at work, if only for a few minutes.
He stumbled along the sidewalk and up to the Presidential Mansion. When he walked through the gate, the security guard, either because he recognized the presidential assistant’s current state or out of apathy, did not question him upon entry. Putting one hoof against the wall to support himself, Enforcer eventually found his way down the corridors to the door of the Horseshoe Office.
Unaware of what he was doing, or what he would say, Enforcer—with what seemed to take an inordinate amount of energy to him—raised his hoof and slowly, but loudly, knocked on the door three times. He let his head fall to the door in exhaustion as he awaited a response.
After waiting thirty or forty seconds without hearing anything from the interior of the room, he repeated this action. Finally, after receiving no response a second time, he pushed open the door.
“Mr. President . . . I’m . . . I’m here,” he said as the door opened, his speech horribly slurred. “Sorry I’m late . . . but . . . but . . . I need to say . . . a few things on my mind . . . which—”
When he saw the president, he stopped himself in mid-sentence. The room was dark, for all the lights had been turned off, but with the light coming from the hallway, Enforcer could see the president: He was reclining in his chair; his legs were propped up on the desk; a black sleeping mask was draped over his eyes, and yellow earplugs assured him against any interruption in his presidential duty. He was snoring loudly—and, upon hearing this, Enforcer only noticed then that the record player, which had played “The Good Fight for the Union” on repeat ever since the president had acquired that single, was turned off.
Enforcer shook his head and closed the door. There was nothing more he could possibly say.