If you are reading this, I guess I should be able to call you dear post-apocalypse reader.
Anyway, I had a fantasy of writing this wearing sunglasses, a colourful shirt and bermuda shorts with a piña colada drifting near my notepad.
It’s the sort of thing one does when they have a newspaper deadline and the end of the world’s looming. Alas, I’m still at my desk at the office.
But, like I said, if you are reading this it means you have survived the grand end or we all are here
and the whole Mayan thing was, as usual, another lousy flop of a story.
Or, perhaps we all misunderstood the Mayans.
It may also say that everything continues as usual or you are one lucky creature for surviving what should have been nature’s attempt at ultimate annihilation.
Then again, it could be you are one sorry sod for not going up in flames with the rest of our pathetic world. You are left to make things work in the hellish remains of Mother Earth.
Well, I’m writing this with a few questions for your future memory. With everything having gone kaput, you are charged by chance to perform the most important act of remembering.
I must ask which parts of our cultures will you rebuild. What will you find most useful to help make your new world more sustainable?
Will you work hard to reconstruct our religions?
But won’t that lead to divisions again? What sort of system will you use to manage the resources of your new world?
People in the world that just ended had system to guided access to resources. Human beings competed with each other in the accumulation of wealth, and those who made more money got access to everything
better healthcare, water, food and shelter.
Those who were unable to accumulate it died of the effects of poverty.
So I’m curious to find out how you’ll organise resources sustainably.
There is also the question of the languages you’ll develop.
How will they conceptualise ideas of human difference?
We had “race” based on melanin content of people’s skins and their continents of origin.
These also gave us much course for conflict and conquest. What of gender and power?
How will you remember the way we organised community roles and responsibilities around it?
As I write this, I’m not sure how the world will end, but after Noah’s flood, we were promised the fire.
Well that next time has come. So if I didn’t make it with you through the apocalypse, I can imagine it’s terrifying to be charged with rebuilding a new way of being in the world.
However, it’s also a very blessed chance. So, if you dress yourself with enough dashikis of compassion, your dialogue with the future should be good. So here’s to happy building.
