My great grandmother was correct. I've lived to see times that would have brought her life-hardened soul once again to tears. She lived through marriage, multiple miscarriages, widowhood, being a rural single mother of two in an era when women still walked two steps behind her husband on the way to mandatory church attendance (never mind prohibition and the family moonshine business), a miscarriage of justice in the death of an adult son, living with her surviving daughter and son-in-law while losing her eyesight.
She was worried about me. My children and grandchildren—which, thankfully, we never had. The longer I live, the better the decision looks. I was raised to survive, by people who were aware a utopia doesn't exist. They were, at least in part, descendants of the indigenous Americans who truly remembered when it was a great land.
For reasons beyond my ability to control, the dream was not to be. Not that I ever was encouraged to seek it. Just the opposite.
I've seen over sixty years of life. Many of my relatives have routinely lived to at or often over a hundred years old. All of them came from storytelling cultures, passing generations of word of mouth history forward. Some of it was scribbled inside worn old family Bibles, granted. Some things were recorded in art-embellished craft items, sung in songs, or recorded imperfectly in outsider-made books. No one here could afford to simply make art. It's still true today, thought in a different way.
I've tried a dozen things to supplement our income over the years. Errand service, food service, factory or farm work, craft work, painting and photography, and finally writing. Limited physical ability threw me into less physical areas, only to discover the social services system is aimed at keeping down the limited population, instead of trying to lift anyone up. Self-sabotaging became a way of life until I finally understood I was basically a moth battling a fat candle flame.
I'm there. In an era when free speech is dying an ugly, convoluted, lie-encrusted death, someone thought to marry that to stealing intellectual property "since it has no commercial value" to "teach" artificial intelligence what natural intelligence is denied. I need income, could never afford a college education, and lived to see a machine get educated at the price of every creative human who worked to create it ... because someone could. Mind blown.
Some lives are precious. Apparently more than others. They can soak up everything, use everything or anything, and leave... nothing.
War of the Worlds, remember that? Sucking up every planetary life to sustain those superior beings, the leftovers spat back out on cropland as fertilizer. Only the planet took its revenge on the microbial level. It will happen here, too.
First they come for the artists, the people with creative minds. In the shadows are remains of every destroyed mind child. These are not the processes of a child's mind, but the culmination of generations of mind children born to lift a species from its self-imposed implosion. Intellectual property served up at greed's own table, disrespect served as sauce.
They're coming for me, for friends, for hope itself. The darkness of the era is deep, dank, unfathomable. They won't rest until we're all gassed, rigor mortis setting in so the hauling away to where we inherit the earth is orderly.
Nobody cares, other than a few left temporarily standing. Don't worry, because we'll all soon be gone.
🕊️
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