A Fire in Utopia

 Once upon a time, there're a clan in the forest called Comu, who built village U, where you can find all the virtues people chase desperately in other villages: justice, freedom, democracy, friendship, honesty, bravery, and so on. This universe was perfect, and vitally fascinating to nearby clues without freedom and rationality traditions. It provided them a shortcut to constituting a good or even better community than that in the western part of the forest.

For example, they had schools, libraries, and universities. They enshrined the right of the villagers in the constitutions. They built highways, super dams, and high-speed rail networks. They developed high-tech, and explore other planets and deep oceans. But that's not the whole story. Their athletes got more gold medals in Forest Olympics. Their people claimed more happiness in everyday life. There were no tragedies and scandals in their newspapers and no corruption in their governments.

Some people say Comu cheats. There are tragedies there but they're not allowed to appear in the newspaper. "Don't worry about it," Comu said. "If nobody knows what happened, it has the same effect of non-exist." What about the people in the tragedies? "Well, they know they shouldn't bother others' life with their personal affairs." What if they refuse to shut up? "They have some misunderstanding about our glorious system. They are re-educating, Soon everything will be OK!"

Comu's village worked well, until fire #19.

When the rumors about the fire first appeared, Comu told other clans in the forest there was no such thing. One day a cottage nearby village U was burnt by fire. Comu insisted that the cottage was the origin of the fire. A couple of days later, another cottage got burnt, while many people saw with their eyes that the fire was spread from village U. Many clans began to transport water from the River to fight the fire. Comu tried at first and claimed they controlled and put out the fire. But soon after inhabitants in the forest found they were lying. As fires in other villages were put out one by one with plenty of water, some villages tried to provide village U water and equipment and were refused. Meanwhile, U villagers were forbidden to cook food with fire. At first, villagers hailed the order, for they'd been told a long time that fire is evil. Some families even destroyed their stoves, to avoid any existence of fire. However, as times went up, 1, 2, and 3 years later, some villagers were fed up with frozen foods and diseases caused by unclean food and water. The last news I heard, was that the new rules said only cooked food is permitted. Good luck to those proud villagers.

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