Seemingly real, seemingly everywhere, the ubiquitous box. Almost all are comfortable in the box. A very cozy dreamland, nightmares and all. What does it matter? Why fight? You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. There are the restless though. They try to crawl up to the top, fling open the flaps and leap out. Ah! Look at me! I am outside! What a new perspective I have! They stare at it and ponder it. They try to get a new understanding and communicate it to the rest. But no matter which side, nor how far away, nor how high their orbit around it, they ever look at it, its' image reflecting back in their minds, never escaping its' gravity.
   Occasionally, one of the mezmerized will be approached by Cassandra, grabbed by the shoulders and told, "! box no is There - box the outside think you think whoYou"  But all they see around her is the box and her speaking gibberish. They think her mad.
   Are you Cassandra? Turning and walking away from the seemingly impossible pandemic insanity? Going silently off into a lonely, frustrated insanity of your own? Thinking of all those seduced by the sirens' song? Ayn Rand, who jumped in and out of the box continuously, rearranging the flaps and creases to suit her own vision of it, then gussying it up with shiny wrapping paper and ribbons and bows. Or Solzhenitsyn, leading the SMERSH thugs through the Moscow subway, musing, "Every man always has a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. ( For, after all, we get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse. ) Others have not yet attained the mature concepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based. Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud, and where would the uninvolved, peaceable average man come by such slogans? He simply does not know what to shout. And then, last of all, there is the person whose heart is too full of emotion, whose eyes have seen too much, for that whole ocean to pour forth in a few disconnected cries. 
   As for me, I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were to few for me, to few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200,000,000? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200,000,000. "  Aleksandr, are you 200? Twice 200? 200,000,000? No. You are the indivisible, inimitable one -  Led by the god-concept aggregate to the gulags before you were ever born. And SunTzu said, "The art of war is of vital importance to the State."  Indeed. So the conflict, and the misery, and the nightmares, and the killing go on and on and on.
   Alas, Cassandra, do not despair and build a box around yourself, for then, truly have they won. Turn around and go back. Look through the masses and the melee and find the one. Don't reach out: Your hand will never be seen. Reach in.  Past the interlocking chinese box of cultural halucinations to the inner projector that projects out its faulty programming, on and on and on; continuously fueled by its own image reflecting back in, on and on and on. Reach for the switch - Click. The experience will be truly sublime-- the eyes will clear away, looking at you, and you will see each other for the first time...