covid-19 sci-fi: they took their $1200 and left
27 May 2020my granddaddy told me it was better than he could have imagined. he said it was violent and hard, of course, but the process was much much better than he would have ever dreamed.
he told me the collapse of the united states was triggered by something called the coronavirus.
he told me that the united states had been doomed from the start. it was doomed not in the way that all natural things are doomed to return to the circle of life; it was doomed because the bones were bad and the roots were rotten. it couldn’t have had an easy, gradual death and re-entry as natural things do. it was founded on death and theft and so the ending had to be hard.
but it was still better than he could have imagined.
he told me that all of the people who already knew amerikkka was rotten got up and left. they went to what used to be called barbados and canada and cuba and nigeria. they went everywhere, actually; everywhere that wasn’t the ticking-time-bomb of america. but when they arrived, they realized that all those names were just names americans used. the people there didn’t think of borders and so they didn’t think of nations. he wondered how long america had been brainwashing its people to still think in borders?
he said he sad for the people who got left behind. the people who wanted to stay to make it a better place. the people who wanted to stay to keep it as it was. they fought each other. it was bloody.
bloody.
you would think with all the video technology we’d developed, they would have avoided civil war. but the civil war had been going on. just framed as single incidents of police brutality and one-off mass shooter events.
but many fewer people died than he could have imagined. many fewer people had to stay for the mess than he thought possible. the money just appeared in people’s accounts (he said it was something like $1200) and then as many that could leave, left.
i’m telling all of you this, my grandbaby, because it is our job to remember. when we forget, our hard-won lessons evaporate. when we forget, other people “help” us remember with their memories. but their memories are not our memories; their experience was not our experience. promise me you’ll remember?
question for readers of this story: if you knew america was about to implode, would you gtfo or stay? why?
words / writing / post-processing
400w / 11min / 4min