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The thin and ragged young seeker of learning and wisdom sat with his teacher, equally ragged and lean, beneath a subtropical tree in what little apparently remained of a forest once known as the greatest in the World. They had migrated there from the same general area of the now devastated Northern Hemisphere, the specific name of which they didn't bother to recall, since they never spoke of it - nor would they think or speak their own names because it forced them to imagine family members and friends, all killed or lost in the chaos and madness that had swept the whole northern continent. So, for most of their long and dangerous journey they had addressed each other as "Boy" and "Prof", the best they could do in shock from those traumatic times. Today, at the edge of a tropical wilderness, they ate from banana, guava and mango trees and a big castana nut tree, plus a few patches of herbal leaf plants, perhaps once part of a finca, or small farm managed by Spanish speaking people, but exactly who and how long ago they couldn't guess. Soon they would throw away their smelly rags in favor of nothing but leaves in the rain, partly because since arriving they had not seen or heard any other people, no animals, only a few birds and one or two strange insects, but that was often true during the several months travelling South in search of food, shelter and safety from the chaos and approaching Autumn and Winter. "Prof" and "Boy" had met wandering with a small group of strangers on a long midwestern highway, forever bereft of vehicular traffic, but then quickly hiding under one of those conrete & steel overpass bridges to escape another of hundreds of tornados that roared through that region every month. In their terror they had clung to each other with people in the center of the shelf, while those near the outer edges were swept away. It was then, as the storm subsided, the boy noticed the university logo on the old man's tattered sports jacket, hence a question and the street i.d "Prof" for professor. After the tornado passed, to ease tension, the old man said: "Well, we seem to have survived again!" To which the boy replied with a sardonic "One more time." From then on they travelled together as a sort of instinctive father-son partnership, always helping each other in everything and always treking South from the near total disaster that surrounded them. Their adventures were many and often terrible. To see people actually kill each other over a bag of rice or corn, or a can of beans at a vandalized supermarket was enough to make them wait until the fighting ended, then search out bits and scraps. They could afford to so because although starving, they were not actually desperate, since while a professor, the old man had detected the insane direction of human events and turned to a private study of survival techniques. So when he met the boy on the road, he carried a backpack full of all kinds of health food bars, water purification packets and vitamin tablets all wrapped up in plastic, plus an extra tooth brush & tubes of toothpaste, 2 large plastic bottles of insect repellent, and belted to his waste a camping knife, a small folding shovel, a compass and, inside a small holster strapped to his lower back, a 22 caliber pistol with 10 rounds. Trampng with thousands of people far less prepared, they helped them scout areas for food, but kept their own supply secret for when they could be alone to dole out half a bar in the morning and half before sleeping. Yet, inevitably, by stripping the land of everything edible, thousands died every day of starvation, disease and violence, which mutely posed the question if anyone would be left alive who could remember and tell how and why it all happened -- and as if by fate, over the months of their friendship, the boy and the old man slowly eased away their mental blocks, especially when once again able to get a full nights sleep in reasonable safety. They even remembered their names - William Collington (Billy) and Professor Matthew Walters (Mat) and their families and where they once lived, the suburbs of Chicago and Philadelphia in a nation both famous and notorious as the United States of America. So they worked out the basic stream of events that had sent them fleeing for their lives. The hardy old man was impressed by how much the boy was able to conribute to this oral history by remembering overheard conversations and boyhood experiences on the scary streets of a country each of them had, in more innocent times, referred to affectionately as "the good old USA." The mystery was how 300 million citizens had surrendered so easily to so much greed and corruption that the nation and the whole continent had degenerated and collapsed, seemingly in less than 10 years. Part of the answer was that thousands of brave citizens had not given up, but were secretly "disappeared" by professional killers, only once in a while their bones turning up in remote areas. A case in point was a young woman studying for a career in the notoriously corrupted Criminal Justice system. Possibly she had spoken to a "friend" about her plans for internal investigation and reform, because she disappeared for over a year despite an araea-wide search by police -- until a man walking his dog found her bones in a public park the police had already covered, strongly implying the officer who organized the search knew exactly where she was because his henchmen had put her there -- and the only reason her story appeared in newspapers and on TV was because her family was rich and influential. The other part of the answer was the fact that all those TV news channels that everyone watched were completely owned and operated by big corporations who were in the same business as all the others - making huge amounts of money, like millions of dollars from false commercial advertising. But if reporters suddenly started reporting on corrupted police departments "on the take" from gangsters and the resulting spread of drug addiction across the country, and crooked, racist judges who imposed significantly longer prison sentences on convicted Blacks who, once in the prison system found it twice as hard to get parole as anyone else, so when they did emerge, more often had become hardened criminals -- such news corporations could expect little or no police protection for reporters on the increasingly dangerous streets. Thus, it was in their best interest that the vast majority of the disappearances never be reported. But word spread quietly through the rumor mill how very dangerous it was to challenge the "big boys" and their many thousands of wanna-be imitators in the various service professions like police and garbage handlers. The fact was, though they dared not admit it, even to themselves, the people had been systematically maneuvered into mute submission to a massive continental take-over by organized crime, an event so fearful and depressing, very few could bear to think about it. But the long term result of millions of people timidly and obsessively attending only to their daily, short term problems was that the long term results were left to the now incorporated criminals to manipulate as they would, and they certainly did. What now seemed like many years ago, the worst of several such aggressively corrupted governments squandered more than a trillion federal tax dollars on several foreign wars, each inspired by the many no-bid contracts awarded to the corporations in the war materials industry who had donated millions of dollars to the political campaigns of friendly politicians, some of whom had served on their own Boards of Directors. But the corporations could not afford to finance the wars from their own profits. Those billions came from the millions of taxpaying citizens who kept the whole system afloat on a rising tide of debt to foreign banks in Europe and Asia that seemed forever patient with such a profoundly corrupted society. Their strange leniency was inspired by a nationwide feeling among many "upwardly mobile" wanna-be millionaires, that the time had come to deliberately bankrupt and eliminate all the social service agencies working people depended on, which wealthy businessmen and their venal politicians had always hated, and force the people down into complete servitude to any private employers who would hire them for very low wages. Yet they called themselves "Libertarians" because they wanted to liberate the money from the lower classes to become super-rich and stay super-rich by returning the human race to their fantasy concept of the ancient Roman Empire (now all but forgotten except in musty old books in deserted and decaying libraries). Many among the richest capital investors felt their wealth to be a magical form of immunity from the death symbols of poverty, homelessnes and disease that they themselves imposed by refusing a more equal distribution of profits among their workers, and they hoped science would soon develop a medical technique, a special combination of vitamins or hormones extracted from anywhere in the World from any animal or plant, it didn't matter, just refine the substance into some sort of youth pill or rejuvenating shot in the arm, anything to stop the aging process. Whatever the price, they would pay it, no problem. Trying to make all that happen, entire factory complexes were exported across oceans to grossly overpopulated nations where people would work for any wages and salaries they could find - and millions of illegal aliens from overpopulated Latin America were smuggled across the Mexican border to compete and drive down the locally higher wages paid to legal citizens. The plan seemed to succeed in the short term, but the corporate executives had ignored the basic economic reality that their growing wealth and power, to which most of them were completely addicted, all depended entirely on millions of people with money to spend, so when they had much less of it, the corporations lost millions of sales which wiped out anything they had gained. Then, many of them resorted to cruder tactics by pumping up the public value of their assets on the stock market, then selling their own majority shares for the inflated price, leaving thousands of honest stockholders with nearly worthless paper. A few cases were prosecuted to make it look like justice, but most were ignored by an extremely pro-business government. Next, criminal real estate corporations offered too-easy housing mortgages to thousands of low income wage earners, then sold the debts to banks, which, after secret and rampant behind-the-scenes speculation, required higher interest rates the low wage earners could never afford (unless they hit the lottery), a monthly bill rising several hundred dollars to over a thousand. So, the would-be home owners simply packed up and drove or walked away from the houses, so many thousands the loss was in the billions because such debts were uncollectable except to cast hundreds of thousands of people out onto the roads and streets with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. Failing that degree of cruelty, the whole international system of inter-connected credit manipulation was thrown into a deepening crisis. The second basic mistake made by so many corporations and their political allies was their stubborn denial that their growth-addicted industrial system had a serious impact on the natural environment. So, to avoid even the thought of NOT building new power plants, factories, houses, supermarkets, cars, ships, planes and airports for a growing population, they preferred to believe the Earth is so huge and resilient it would forever provide growing opportunities for their many profitable enterprises, and Mankind's manifest destiny must be to terraform the Moon and Mars and expand outward into deep cosmic space, like Star Trek but not quite that naive. So they hated environmental activists for their expensive lawsuits to save this or that wild habitat, and eventually they bought them out, quietly investing in and taking over one group after another, until whatever remained of the ecology movement operated under their control, collecting donations for lost causes like saving the polar bears, and promoting the oxymoronic policy of "sustainable growth". Finally, except for a few brave scientists, everyone ignored the mounting evidence that not only was the climate warming artificially from greehouse gases like carbon dioxide expelled into the air by millions of gas-burning vehicles and thousands of coal-fired power plants and jet planes, but that same toxic residue was settling down into the oceans as acid rain killing the coral reefs that so much marine life depended on, and as mercury into all fish everywhere and up the food chain into our human bodies. Then the growing tons of garbage illegally dumped in the oceans was killing so much phytoplankton that, together with destruction of the last rain forests, the supply of oxygen was decreasing while methane from all the decay was increasing, which could eventually suffocate oxygen-breathing creature like us, or since methane is flammable, burn away the surface of the planet. This is what happens when too much of a good thing turns everything bad, when the balance of Nature is overthrown by insatiable human appetites. By that time, the two dominating political parties, and the politicians they put in office with corporate campaign money, had become the butt of popular jokes, yet the longer the charade of democracy continued the more eloquent their promises of reform, so rather than try to organize self-reliant communities for a genuine revolution, millions of voters flocked to support the most attractive and charming candidates, year after year, elections made them FEEL powerful. But even if there had been some ingenious way to overturn the system, only a few could imagine anything really different to replace it. So-called "socialism", the aging traditional enemy of capitalism, had failed in every nation that tried it, and all but two of the "Communist" governments had converted to private enterprise by inviting foreign money investors to build, manage and profit from hundreds of privately managed factories and offices. It cost those governments minimal utility services in exchange for minimal taxes, but it put their millions of deeply dissatisfied citizens to work with hope for a new future of increasing personal and family wealth. In China, the little red book everyone had been forced to read, "Thoughts of Chairman Mao" had long ago been replaced by the writings of Adam Smith and mottos like "To be rich is glorious". The fact is, every child on Earth is born with instinctive desire to grow, and with the advance of technology and the foreknowledge of death, that translates into greed for ever more personal property and less work = a small class of rich owners dominating a huge class of poor workers all trapped in the scramble for money. That global economic machine was fueled by coal-burning electric power plants for millions of homes, factories, office buildings, their air-condtioning units and many billions of smaller mechanisms and gadgets -- and by oil refined to thousands of petro-chemical throw-away products from computers and clothing to plastic bags and bottles -- and gasoline for millions of cars, trucks, trains, ships, and the paraffin-based fuel for jet planes. But over time, as the population grew to 6, and 7 billion, exploding on toward 8 and 9, oil drilling could not keep up with growing demands. Even though coal supplies were plentiful, it could not be cheaply refined and the thousands of tons of its toxic smoke polluted everything around the World. So inevitably, when more expensive sources of alternative energy, like wind and solar also failed to satisfy the ever-growing demand, gas prices inched upward until many thousands of small businesses lost their tiny profit margins and had no choice but to raise the price of their products, which included the price of food from the growing cost of gas-powered transportation. Then the entire social structure began to fall apart. As failing businesses raised their prices again and again in an upward spiral of inflation, the rapidly growing number of bankrupt corporatuions and impoverished citizens could pay little or no taxes, without which the government could provide little or no services or emergency relief, even when the corrupt agencies consented to do so. The result was millions of people were left to survive any way they could, including all sorts of petty crimes. Soon, the whole economy was collapsing, especially after the foreign banks failed to lend the government any more money, so very little was left to feed the nearly 500 million people of that once bountiful and prosperous continent. Farmers might provide for themselves, but those who were landless, unemployed and homeless could not. So, the scrabbling and wandering began and continued year after year, thousands dying every day from hunger, illness and brutality, except in the wealthy neighborhoods, of course. There law and order was strictly enforced, until finally not even they could be defended. Part of the trauma for the old man and the boy was that not once during all those months of walking had they been able to bathe or simply wash. What little water they found was immediately treated for brushing teeth and drinking in the plastic quart bottles they carried slung with scrap cord over their shoulders. Even when marching along on ocean beaches to detour around villages and towns, they found masses of foul smelling garbage washing up as far as the eye could see, the result of many years of illegal dumping. To bathe there would be virtual suicide, as the old man explained to the boy, who was tempted to dive in; but there were no medicines of any kind for any illness, except in towns and cities where one abandoned all hope to enter the savage little criminal empires, the same as everywhere on the chaos-ridden continent. So, they had wandered filthy and starving, but alive by consistently avoiding other people when possible, traveling mostly at night and not encouraging any brief meetings longer than necessary, which the old man managed with his limited Spanish, teaching the boy a few key phrases, like "Donde esta alimento?" to give an impression they had none. Then, "Adios" and "Vaya con Dios." The shift in language indicated they must have crossed the Mexican border some time ago, but when the two governments stopped paying wages, the border guards had disappeared and everything of any value looted. Thus, there was no visable border. Even the drug smugglers vanished when their customers had no money for food OR drugs. From Matt and Billy's point of view as scavengers, the whole World had become a trap, until, after treking down through Central America, the landscape slowly began to change from ravaged ciudadas, pueblos, casas, and dead bodies around gasless cars and trucks on deserted roads to desolate fields and then the beginning of a jungle as trees and underbrush grew dense and dark. It was here they found their fruit and nut trees and settled under their protection, wondering why no other people had found the place. There was no way for them to know the human population had crashed and plummeted to a fraction of its former mass, with the result that many areas were now deserted. So here they were, eating healthier food than either had seen for many years and with energy to arrange their little camp for some of the needs they had survived so long without. From a nearby streamlet they drew enough water for drinking and simple washing, and they even made crude new toothbrushes from sticks and plant fibers, and wove mats and covers for occasionally cooler nights. Then, after their sleep time lengthened with softer dreams, they told their personal stories, and on one of those days, the boy asked a very big question, his grammer impaired from a childhood of constant moving and no time or place for schooling: "Professor Matt, why the World go crazy and all destroyed?" Pausing to think about it, the old man realized he had come to love the boy, tough and resilient little man that he was, so he wanted to give him as much as possible the schooling he had missed, but he answered more from his own independent thinking than any standard university curriculum. The boy often interrupted him to explain a word or phrase, but the old man had pondered the human dilemma for so many years, he continued easily: "What they didn't know, and only a few could imagine, is that life evolves throughout the Cosmos in various odd places among all the stars, but much too far away now and too briefly for any contact. In the great Cosmic mixture of materials, the swirling creation of uncountable suns in uncountable galaxies brings along so many uncountable planets that often, when certain solar systems have just the right balance of chemical and nuclear ingredients, and when certain planets at a certain time in their evolution orbit at just the right distance from their parent star, life will rise up into being --- but only for awhile, because the thousands of lightening bolts necessary to build up a surplus of energy in the waters turning brown with amino-acids that, together with surrounding elements, create the first living cells, do so within a seasonal ebb and flow of sunshine and rainfall that give only limited energy and the cells immediately lose energy, so with the powerful forward thrust of their creation, they they do two things: absorb surrounding materials for food, and divide into new and seperate copies of themselves so their momentum goes on, an exhausting struggle that wears them down, so each cell must weaken and die. "But that is an outrage, a monstrous dirty trick when that sexual push for continued life slowly changes and evolves into highly complex organisms with self-centered awareness and forethought, who, when realizing the inevitability of death, react in terror, denial and RAGE, pledging to track and kill whoever or whatever is responsible, which is everyone and no one, everything and nothing, because they only know themselves and the other less troubled creatures of land, sky and sea. So, when death arrives again and again relentlessly to each one of them, they become the most dangerous and destructive species on any living planet where self-conscious behavior grows to dominate events. Others among them simply deny that death is the end, but instead the beginning of an eternal, non-physical spirit life. But that only satisfies a few of them. The rest cannot bear the thought of losing their physical bodies, so they go on campaigns of killing "enemies" who live in other nearby places, but not part of their extended tribal family - and when they invent weapons of mass slaughter, they annihilate each other. "In each case, fictional space explorers might discover yet another once life-supporting planet that murdered itself to hide from the fact of death. But no such archeological priority would ever be initiated by any species so deeply involved in the hungry business of life devouring life to live a little longer, where everyone must eat or be eaten - and how could they admit and confront such a grim reality when self-loving, family-loving mutually shared delusions are the only way to tolerate such a dangerous day-to-day existence, while yearning for and imagining some form of salvation? Instead, they blame other people and launch wars of extermination against all those evil tribes of that demonic race whose sorcerers and witches magically caused them to die, and finally, after centuries of technical progress they arm themselves with exploding populations and nuclear weapons to invade and blast each other into extinction. "It never failed. One by one, as each thermonuclear sun slowly burned smaller, it's orbiting planets would each in turn transform from blistering hot to warm and humid, and soon the lightning storms would spark the waters alive and life would again evolve and flourish for a billion years or so as it divided into opposing factions of predator and prey, enemy tribes, races, classes, religions, and proceed to mutually self-destruct -- down to the last planet in line as the declining sun flashed red and shrunk into yet another dwarf star with all its planets cold and dead - the inexorable process of aging within the Cosmic body, just like all the others. "Thus, the inhabitants of the biosphere known to itself as "planet Earth" would not know, and only a few could guess, in a certain type of solar system like theirs, each planet must pass through its own peculiar stages of life and death, that even cold, dead Mars had once been a green and flowering biosphere to support living beings who evolved full of the same passionately self-destructive fury against the inevitable end of individual life. But the poor Martians never got a chance to fatally pollute or blow up their own planet. Instead, they were struck by a huge comet that tore an enormous gash into the surface and burned everything to dust, small rocks and iron oxide, and altered the plane of its orbit around the Sun. "Then, after Earth finishes its cycle, broiling hot Venus, when cooled by the retreating Sun, will also evolve into life and struggle through the same long and self-torturing process of death-hating, self-consuming ecocidal collapse -- and then but briefly on close-orbiting Mercury, before the shrinking Sun erupts its Red Giant gasp and sinks down into its lingering white midget death, until the Cosmic body reduces it all to dusty fumes that agglomerate into vast clouds of radio-active soot for yet another centripetal creation of new stars and new planets." After finishing his dissertation, Matthew wondered how much the uneducated boy had been able to comprehend. But Billy's next question reassured him. "So, no matter what anybody do, it happen anyway?" The old man smiled and nodded appreciatively. "Yes, even though a few people think to live a more sensible life, the ever-growing mass of humanity drives itself crazy with fear and hate. Obviously, you and I are living sensibly here in this garden of plenty." But Billy asked, "So, you and me, we die someday too?" Yes, but when we have children, they go on after us." "How we have children?" "A man and woman enjoy sex together and the woman grows a baby in her womb and in about 9 months it comes out as a new human being." On and on the questions came, and Matt answered them all in detail, but according to his own understanding, so Billy was acquiring an education more exceptional than any of those lost children with whom he had spent the first few years of his life. Then he asked, "What happens after we die?" The old man was waiting for that one, and he answered with what he himself had decided from all he had read, heard and experienced. "The Cosmos is an ever-changing juxtaposition of opposites, very hot, very cold, relatively slow and fast, outwards forever, inwards forever, creation and destruction. So, what is the opposite of physical life? Death? No, death is an empty nothingness because it is only a transition point from one extreme to another. There are many people who have had what are called "near death experiences" in which by accident, illness or attempted murder, their hearts stop beating for a few seconds or minutes, the person falls unconscious, the heart again resumes its rythmic beating, the person wakes up and goes on living. "But many of these people, myself included, report a rising up out of the body to see the nurses move it to the emergency room, and some have travelled to other parts of the hospital to hear conversations, and some whose bodies were dead for 20 to 30 minutes, have reported passing through a long dark tunnel to a being of light where their whole life was quickly reviewed, after which the being of light says: "You must go back. There is something more you must do." "A man named Robert Monroe did years of experimental research in this area and his basic conclusion was: "We are more than our physical bodies." Much more. Therefore, regardless of what any organized religion says, or any professional philosopher, any agnostic or atheist, when each and every human being dies, his or her inner self, their soul, rises up and out of their body and passes through to some sort of spirit existence......" But Billy interjected another question, "Since there are good people and bad people, are there good souls and bad souls? Do they all go to the same place?" Like most children, Billy had heard about Heaven and Hell. "Yes, no and maybe. Every child is born innocent and loving, but if they are beaten, sexually molested and harshly punished for honest mistakes, they will turn evil and do things as bad or worse than their parents and whoever hurt them. Without positive, loving influence they have no choice, and all those who seem to enjoy a good life become objects of their hatred. Thus savagely beaten by his father, Gary Gillmore, life long criminal and talented artist, when released on parole, could not stop himself from murdering two more law-abiding citizens. "The question is, can a soul born innocent be so tainted by horrible experiences that it cannot be saved? There is no record indicating that mass murderers Hitler and Stalin ever expressed remorse for their crimes, in Hitler's case just the opposite. So, can such souls be purged and cleansed? I really don't know. The Christian Bible says "Judge not, for you will be judged." That makes sense to me." Then it was late, so with that unanswered question consigned to their dreams, they retired, each to his hand-woven mat and cover to sleep. But before drifting off, the old professor reviewed their recent life under jungle trees and remembered noticing their two or three little feasts a day were depleting the trees' slow production of fruits and nuts, and also the smell of their toilet area sometimes wafted near as the breeze shifted -- and one day he noticed the boy masturbatiing in the bushes near the little streamlet. So, he realized they must soon be moving on, preferably deeper into the jungle to find the Indians whom he knew from his archeological expeditions had once lived in scattered tribes throughout this area. If they could work to earn acceptance, when he died, the boy would not be alone, but live with people who would care for him and he would meet a young woman near his age to marry and have children. Next morning he explained it all to the boy, answering as many of his question as he could, and then they made their preparations, first loading up Matt's half empty backpack with a week's supply of fruits, nut and herbs, then from more fibrous plants made two simple carrying sacks for another week's supply, plus full water bottles and long sticks for balance and protection. But Matt's handy little pistol, without oil, had rusted in the humid tropical air, so he buried it in a shallow grave with no marker. So, one morning they rolled up their little mats and off they went, the little cooking pot and water bottles softly clinking as they walked adorned with leaves woven around waste and head, looking more like the Indians whose friendship they sought, than any previous lifestyle they might once have known and forgotten in the rapidly vanishing past. (This novel was begun Monday, June 30, 2008 by the author John Talbot Ross) Back to Contents |
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The personal names used in this story are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. The village of Santa Flores is also fictional, at least as far as my researches have been able to discover. But if a village by that name does exist in Columbia, I hope the people will accept my apology, because only my highest respect for them is intended. |
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Todos los nombres personales en esta historia son ficticios y cualquier paracido a personas vivas o muertas es coincidente. El pueblo de Santa Flores es tambien ficticio, al menos por lo que mis investigaciones han sido capaces de descubrir. Pero si un pueblo de aquel nombre existe realimente del Columbia, espero que la gente acepte mi apologia, porque solo mi respeto mas alto para ellos es querido. |