Year Zero With Blood – Y3000 Sans Bullets
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The time is Y0, the Year 0. (Not really Y0, of course, as there had been fabulous human history for more before the so-called Year Zero than after.) Still to come is the Inquisition, the Crusades. The manifestly destined wrecking of the Native Americans North & South from sea to shining sea. The importation of human chattel as slaves from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Africa. The on-going oppression of women as a subtler chattel, or cattle. A myriad of ultimately aimless named-slaughters and unnamed dismemberments and indentures. A myriad is ten thousand so 4.9875 Stupid Slaughters a year is about right. The singed shuddering stench of the electric chair. Ah the glory of mankind.
Of course there was real and sweet and tender glory of dappled things seen by poets and notes written, mozartian and billets doux. I talk heartbrokenly about the smoky turquoise of your eyes and that is science and jazz, worth the synapses being arranged more complexly than mollusks’.
But I’m trying to compare for you that things can change in a few thousand years. Not the lyric and empiric, but the stunningly stupid. So by Y3000 we have plank-alongside-of-the head finally gotten some crucial things.
It is insane to spend $820,000 per minute on weapons systems and other modalities of destruction.
Whoops, I forgot the extra $200,000 per minute on ‘off-the-books’ Iraq. We figure that out considerably before Y3000. Education R We, Yippee and glee all around. We get it in a flash flood down the arroyo of the collective consciousness and conscience around 2033. Oh, it would serve the world, the turquoise spaceship, better if every single centavo of our resources were devotedly devoted to education and fixing tsunamis, avalanches, quakes, and furacaos and so on. It seems so screamingly obvious from the vantage of Y3000. Just as we recoil from slavery, they recoil from our malignant waste, our belligerent narcissistic aggrandizement. And if not you directly, pilgrim, nor me – yet we allowed it. We were cowed. We were buffaloed. Apathy seeped into our unwary marrow.
Further yet though, we wake. We refuse. We refuse to be duped. We refuse to be corporate cogs. We demand equality and happiness. We tend the planet and its denizens, very much including each other. Not in some simplistic norman-rockwell, hallmark card sappy way, but with respect and good humor and some semblance of sharing.
We take responsibility – the ability to respond. We buy out all our military obligations to veterans. We train all those military age young folk to build and repair. They extend the wifi infrastructure and teach computers to young and old. We use people skillfully. We employ people in creating a planet we can be proud of in Y3000. As if the planet were a pearl and your soul a jewel I hold in my hand.
appendix: There is a tricky journey between here and there because we don’t all get sane at once. We have to have ingenious substitutes for aggression and belligerence to which many are adrenally addicted. Let them design very violent video games. You don’t prefer that to one single actual amputee where the stupid sods actually blew someone up? For gods’ sakes get the porn less hidden so we can hose it down with some dark humor.
The more you fight, the more they fight. There is no victory that way, no matter your determination. It simply doesn’t work. They don’t bunch up conveniently in armies on fronts. Those days are long long past. You have to do an alchemy and shift their murderous intentions to tending. Teach them to protect rather than to destroy. It works sooner than you think once we get the line down the rapids. Education ∞.
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Recoil is just the word. I may begin to recoil at my own reflection in the mirror if I don't do more.
You'll be glad to hear the shame drove me to write a letter to the editor of our local rag this morning after I read Y0-Y3000.
a thousand years? yikes.
cl, I don't think it takes us 1000 years to get a lot less bloodthirsty — but it is the most useful vantage for a futurist because it really forces you or allows you to dramatically shapeshift your thinking.
ofdroll, not to be left behind, I wrote the Letter in the next post to the Editor.
Even though I get much more vertigo than you apparently do, pogblog, I am tiptoeing into experimenting with the Y3000 view.
Like you, the embarrassment factor is awful. I imagine explaining this or that fad or policy and I feel like a teenager all over again. Which is societally I suppose what we are.