A Glimpse of the Future

Diary, May 14, 2019

Dust. Everything, every road, was dusty. The wind blew it around till the rains hit, then you had mud. Everywhere the mud went, green. It was like nature was taking revenge on them for the hundred years of oil. For their greedy impatient excesses. A revenge of sprouting leaves and purple flowers, covering the crumbling pavement, crowding out the roads, erasing them. The ditches filled with debris and flooded the roads, washing them out, covering them with inches of sediment, which sprouted flowers, bushes and trees. Roads became impassible, broken, lost. Where the leaves fell, more sprouts rose the following spring. More trees grew year by year. 

Wildfires in summer and fall till the rains put them out. There was no fuel for fire fighting planes. And on the ground, if you have to hike to the fire? You arrived too late. Folk living in the boonies either cleared the trees well back and kept a pond and a pump or they ran away when it came. Sometimes they didn't make it. Sometimes the fire crews would find the bodies, often choked to death in the smoke, faces twisted in horror and disbelief. 

The prior generation's obsession with comfort and safety killed them in the reality of the modern post-oil era. Old ideas that don't work now, like living in the boonies for no good reason, that could kill you. Did in many cases. With four out of five people only partially employed and glad to have ten hours a week, and the federal government bankrupt along with the Dollar, the First World was nothing at all. It was over. It was an apocalypse, as North America had seen over and over again, through 4 prior complex civilizations. But that hardly mattered to the people clinging to life in the dust. Volunteers with scavenged tools dug their ditches by hand, dragged rusting culverts into place, hoping they'd save the road another season. Many rode bicycles bearing tools, lunch, a canteen, in hopes of making it more bearable. If the county could pay for the work, they would, but new currencies were unstable and susceptible to manipulation, crashes, so gold was king. 

Most people dreamed of owning a solar panel and had a stack of car batteries set aside. When the power was on, more likely if you lived in town or owned your own generator, you could charge them for the majority of time when the power was off. That meant you could have a radio, get some news or some hint of the old civilization through music. The old timers in particular obsessed about that. Or watched old movies on battery powered DVD players or old computers. A wealthy town would have both power and internet. Maybe even enough power for hot water, enough that folks could get clean and not stink. With a solar panel you could have radio, lights, maybe even some hot water sometimes. Once a week in the winter, twice a week in the summer. The demand and utility made them more expensive, and worth stealing. 

Alas, most of the time government stuck its nose it, it wasn't to fix what was broken. It was to take what wasn't nailed down and feed the parasites at the capitol. They were nothing. Good for nothing. Trouble brewed and simmered, and sometimes the representatives nobody liked just didn't show up, or if they did, they didn't seem to return to the capitol with their ill gotten gains. Nobody seemed to like how they disappeared, but the capitol should have remembered this is well beyond a Depression, and folks are like to get even, more than not. 

About the only folk doing well are machinists. Everybody needed replacement parts, especially the local farmers. With no hard currency, there were no imports. News was, China collapsed after they stopped buying bonds supporting currencies that allowed the nations they bought bonds from to buy Chinese goods, which allowed the Chinese to buy bonds. Shot themselves in the foot. Civil war, famine, all that happened over there. Nobody here really cared. We have our own problems. Upshot here is machinists were making the parts they used to get cheap from China, so better mean it when you order repair parts. They seriously cost, and sometimes pay in gold. Or a lot of chickens. Things people need or value. With those resources, machinists end up rich men with big houses and trophy wives and mistresses and a bevy of children. Their good fortune is known. A town with a machinist survives. A town without one withers. 

I hope, someday, we'll recover to some extent. The boonie folk are dying off. We can't help them. They either farm or they die. If they picked a place with a nice view they're a target of bandits with nothing better to do but amuse themselves, and the rumors of what happens in home invasion is grim enough to abandon such places and burn them to the ground for the wailing dead. If one believed in ghosts, they would be surely haunted, and cursed as well. There are more Manson Families today than ever before. The times create them. There is no hope for many. They find their end. We'll have to hit bottom before we can climb back up, and I worry, in all this dust, just how few of us will live to see it. 

This is the sort of thing we will probably live through because our system of government is contrary, abusive, and broken. It is only consistent about ever increasing taxation and complexity, and finding ways to be less effective at putting out the fires, guarding the borders, punishing criminals, and keeping the peace. We are left with a ruin, with apocalypse. If we continue along the same way we've been going since the 1970s... we will die out. Maybe the next civilization will be more vicious and hateful, keep it together a bit longer. Maybe it will return to a ruin with nomads living in tents, tales of metal crabs powered by magic black gold, tearing across the ground at great speed, fast as an antelope. Or maybe there will be birdcalls, mosquitoes, and silence.