Falling Star

A star fell out of the night sky.

Blazing, seen clearly from the ground even against the gentle glow from the dying fire beside which I sat with my son, it tore across the heavens for barely a second but I saw it. I watched it fall, and I made a wish. The kind of wish that knew would never be answered, but one that I hoped would be. I think that’s why they call it a wish.

Maybe calling it a prayer would have been more accurate. Though I don’t know who or what I was praying to, assuming that anything was listening. But it reminded me of a conversation I had when I was a boy with my father, watching a different falling star.

My father had been a mountain of a man. The kind that people used to get out of the way of, but he was also a gentle giant. The kind of man you would hand a newborn kitten to with the full knowledge and confidence that it would be safe. If anyone who knew him ever heard that he had done violence or evil, they would have laughed.

“Good” was a word often used to describe him. “Safe hands” was another. But most importantly to everyone else, and falling second on the list to me, was “sharp or clever.” Be it was with his tongue when he felt the urge, or in his temper, he was sharp. In all my years, I never once knew him to be anything less than clever in all he did.

Not to say, of course, that he was perfect. Not even to say that he was a genius, I learned early in life that one can be clever without being the brightest bulb in a room. Clever is always how I would describe him, but only when people asked me to explain why I idolized him. He was a kind man, from the tips of his thinning black hair to the ends of his toes, he was kind.

But it was a strange type of kindness. One that, according to most of what I’ve managed to read in my life, is rare according to how people generally think. His heart did not bleed witnessing suffering, the way that old manuscripts always talk about, but rather it was tender. And I think that’s a better thing, because it was proven by him to be better.

I knew people, men and women and others, who were unlike like him that sense. And I mention his kindness, his tenderness of heart, because it is an important piece of my development. He taught me how to love others as I love myself, once I learned how to do that.

And on the night we watched a star fall together, he told me a story about what happens when people do not act with kindness to others. A story about a world that had forgotten how to look at each other with compassion, even if we did not weep in time with their pains.

-0-

Sitting with me next to a camp fire, he pointed out the star to me as it blazed across the twilight sky and asked me what I thought it was.

“It’s a shooting star,” my voice was still high in those days, and my confidence in my safety in the world unshaken. “Quick! Make a wish, dad. But don’t tell me what it is or it won’t come true!”

He laughed gently before letting me have my moment of silence. When I reopened my eyes, he handed me a perfectly golden marshmallow on the end of a stick. Carefully, I tore the crisped shell off the treat and handed the stick back to him. They were, and still are, incredibly rare things; and we only had one each.

“Where did you get these,” I blew on the crispy shell, turning it slightly to make sure that none of the molten sugar from the inside dripped to the ground. It would have been a terrible shame to waste it. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“Sometimes things get found from the Before. And we all pooled our resources to buy a mint condition bag. Once it was opened, I took my share and brought you out here.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Sugar mostly, I think. I don’t really know and I don’t think it matters. Once upon a time, people used to care a lot about what was in their food, but these days I think we can indulge a little.”

“Why did they care so much?”

“How old do you think I am,” his laugh was deep, seeming to come out of an infinite well of good humour that never dried up, no matter how hard life got. I never did learn how he managed it, that endless joy for life, but as I grew I figured that it was a choice he made everyday. How he made that choice will forever be a mystery.

“Older than me!”

“Well aren’t you clever tonight. Here’s what I know about it. Back Before, people around here had more food than they knew what to do with, and were so focused on making their lives more comfortable, that they allowed the companies who made the food to put anything in it, so long as the cost stayed down.”

“Cost? Like from trade?”

“Similar. There was something called money back then. A silly thing, if you think about it from our perspective. But to them, well there were so many people back then that they couldn’t operate the same as we do.”

“What do you mean? How many people?”

“No one knows for sure. But what’s the biggest number you know?”

“A mega-quinti-billion,” how smart I thought I was, making that number up on the spot. It sounded real enough and my father just laughed his deep, rumbling laugh again. The one that always made me smile.

“Ok, ok. I set myself up for that one, eh? Well, let me try this: you know how big the community is?”

“Yes! There’s two thousand, seven hundred, and thirty eight! of us! No wait! Thirty nine, Mrs. Freedman had a baby last week.”

“Ok good. Glad they’re teaching you important things in school. Now imagine ten thousand of our communities.”

“What!”

“Yes, now consider that that’s only how many people lived in some of the biggest cities.”

“No! It’s not possible! How did they feed them all?”

He explained, briefly, that a lot of farming technologies and methods were lost in the Collapse. That the wars had killed so many people that even his unbelievable claims about cities were tiny in comparison. Looking back on it, I understand the method to his madness. He was guiding the conversation so that he could tell me about the wars, but at the time, I remember thinking that I was the one in control.

Who doesn’t have all the answers at that age?

“Dad,” I asked as he handed the stick with the marshmallow back to me and I repeated the ritual of tearing off the perfectly golden outer layer. “Why did the wars start?”

“Oh, son,” he sighed, holding the stick in just the right spot over the fire and turning it steadily to keep the toasting even. “No one really knows. We have theories, everyone does. Mine is that they stopped caring about each other. Stopped seeing other people as people first, and instead started seeing them as… well, politics instead.”

“What do you mean? How can… I mean, it’s easy to see a person,” I waved my hand expressively. “Look! See? It’s easy.”

“It is easy, son. But that’s part of the problem, because eventually it became easier to not see them that way. I don’t know why, so I can only tell you my guesses, but Before people saw each other as broken down into different groups. They weren’t human to each other, not completely. They were their group first and last and only.”

“What were the groups?”

“Lots of things. There were so many groups you could sort people into that it didn’t really matter, because there were going to be others who agreed with you.”

“But why?”

“Because there were problems. A city of a million was still considered not very large, can you imagine that? A city with people who had lived there their whole lives, but never even seen each other, let alone met. And there were so many problems that followed largely because of the sheer numbers of people. Well, that and there were other reasons.”

“What were they?”

“Again, no one knows for sure. But I’ll tell you about some of the groups and try to explain why they happened the way they happened, if you’d like.”

“Yes please!”

“The biggest one was skin colour.”

“That’s stupid! People are people, and Mila Softwalker said that God just left different people in the oven for different amounts of time because he wanted us to look different.”

“Do you believe in Mila’s baker God?”

“Well, no. But it makes sense.”

“Something called melanin is what gives human skin it’s colour. But that doesn’t matter. Listen, in the Before, people cared a lot about that kind of thing. And the organizations who wanted to stop people from caring so much, eventually started caring a lot about it themselves.”

“Why?”

“Easy answers. That’s the secret, much like these,” he waved the stick with what was left of the marshmallow on it at me, “people wanted the easy answers. And they were willing to go to war over those answers, trying to force others to agree with them.”

“That doesn’t make sense. War is hard.” I only knew about the concept from school, the community in which I lived hadn’t seen armed conflict since my father was a boy, so I didn’t understand why anyone would want to do it. “No one who is smart would want to do war.”

“There are always reasons for everything. And those reasons aren’t always clear until we look back at them later. But what you’re saying is just another easy answer. Do you remember Rachel Starreader?”

“Of course,” I was immediately sullen. Rachel had been a serious bully of mine who would only stop picking on me after I broke her nose. That was the only time I ever saw my father get genuinely angry, when Rachel’s mom came to us demanding any number of unpleasant punishments for me. He had actually ignored her, walking away and making the irate woman follow him into the town square, where he had spent the next hour shouting.

I hadn’t been allowed to follow, but given that Rachel never bothered me again and her mother gave my whole family a wide berth afterwards, I can imagine the kind of shame and maybe even threats that had flowed. But I understood what he meant, sometimes the only way to stop cruel people is with violence of some kind. Verbal for Mrs. Starreader, and physical for Rachel.

What didn’t make sense to me, was what any of this had to do with people not treating each other as people. So, I asked him. Ah, the joys of youth and the power of direct questions and even more direct answers. People rarely try to be politic with children.

“You said no one who was smart would want to do a war. But what if a country was behaving like Rachel? Hurting the other countries that were smaller than it just for fun or profit, sometimes having their actions be protected by something like her mother.”

“Then they have to be stopped!”

“And sometimes the only way to stop them is war. It’s horrible. It’s the last possible solution, or at least, it should be. Because it’s also an easy answer. Instead of listening, instead of learning and growing, people can choose to go to war. Fight it out and let ‘might make right.’ Primarily once they stop seeing each other as people.

“It happens with skin colour too. It’s an easy answer to say, ‘they’re not like us, let’s fight them!’ But it’s an even easier answer to say, ‘they look like someone who hurt me, so I’m going to hurt them.’ And that is one of the things that led to the wars.”

“Only one of them?”

“Yes. Only one of them. But the fact is that the answers were all easy, son. No one was willing to try for anything other than the easiest answers. They chose hate because it’s easier than love, it’s even easier than kindness. And those who didn’t choose hate, chose the easiest answer of all, simply not caring.

“The more the world changed, the more people chose hate, the more people also chose to not care. And once that reached a critical mass, that means something like how much weight gets added to tip a scale, then there wasn’t enough will left to stop any of the bad things that led to the wars.”

“Like what?”

“Corporations controlled everything. Some of them were even trying to build underground cities so that they could control who was allowed to have clean air. But things like food, water, electricity, medicine, they controlled it and so could take it away if anyone annoyed them. And people were ok with that because they had been so beaten down by everyone else being so hateful all the time that they didn’t have the energy to try anymore.”

“So who killed the world?” That was a question that had never been answered in school. The teacher always told us that we weren’t old enough yet, and that the answers were too complicated for us to fully understand yet. So they instead focused on building our knowledge of the world we were already a part of, and left teaching us why the world ended for later.

“Everyone. And no one. There used to be a thing called the tragedy of the commons, ever heard of it? No? Well, it’s really very simple. If everyone is equally responsible, then no one is responsible. Have you ever seen something out of place, and thought ‘oh, that’s someone else’s problem?’”

“Yes.”

“Imagine the whole world thought that way all the time about every issue under the sun.”

At the time I struggled to understand it. The ‘somebody else’ who’s problem I assumed those things were, were grownups. But grownups don’t have grownups to take care of things, or so I thought. I hadn’t learned about socially delegated authorities yet.

“Wow. So is that why we’re working on fixing the world? Because we’re the ones responsible?”

“Yes and no. We made the choice to stay when the corporations took everyone to Mars. And we’re working on-”

“There are people on Mars!?”

“Maybe. We don’t know for sure. Lots of them went, but who knows how many survived the trip or even if they’re still there. They left before the bombs fell and took out all the major cities. They weren’t around for the water wars, or the enviro-collapse. Who knows if they’re still out there.”

A long time passed, and the marshmallows were finished all too soon. My father gave me his, only taking a small share when I insisted that he take some he said he had tried them in his youth and wanted me to have the experience instead.

When the fire burned down until only the glowing embers remained, he whispered to me, “when I wish on a star, I always wish for the same thing. I wish that you don’t ever have to live through anything like the wars again. That you and your siblings will always be safe and happy and fed.”

-0-

My father’s wish came true. Thanks to his work, I was able to spend more time in school than any other generation of my family. I studied and learned and became an explorer. I found the sources of the rivers that fed the Great Lakes, and helped start the cleansing of those sources. In another few generations, those enormous bodies of water will be healthy.

So, feeling slightly sad that I didn’t have marshmallows to share with my son, I turned to him and said, “my wish came true, so it’s safe to tell you.”

Only to be soundly rebuked with a determined, “no! If you tell a wish, it won’t come true! And if it already has, then maybe it’ll be taken away. Do grownups forget how magic works?”

I laughed and tousled his hair. “Why don’t I tell you a story about the people who live on Mars?”

“There are PEOPLE on MARS!?”

“I like to think so. And, who knows, maybe one day one of those falling stars will be their spaceships coming home.”

-0-

Thank you for reading! This story is a companion piece to my Top Story earning "Look Up" from January. Thanks Donna Fox for the idea of writing it :)