The Great Depression

The panic that ensued mirrored that of the hysteria of Y2K; rioting and looting, apocalyptic utterances; the end of the world. Big and small businesses alike relished in the pandemonium that drew the forsaken to their store fronts, emptying their stock like “out of business” liquidation sales. Their jubilation quieted once the contagious virus of paranoia coughed up and spat upon the walls of their establishment. The infection spread. The chatter from the informed, over various mediums, were convinced the end of days were here. The diagnosis was delirium, and prophetic pharmacologists prescribed unhealthy doses of folklore and nihilist fiction as the remedy. The foreseen panic in scripture was created today by fear frozen sheep unable to see the strings animating their movements, decisions. It was true that the water levels had risen, depleting hundreds of square inch of land monthly, and it was true that natural disasters were becoming more common, shifting the traditional worldwide reaction to them from disbelief to disregard; but the horsemen of the apocalypse never came. The earth did not open up and swallow its inhabitants without warning. The great asteroid that made fossil of skeleton and dust of flesh, of our reptilian ancestors, did not return for a curtain call. Monday through Sunday continued as did January through December. The sun rose in the east, smiling, and set in the west, yawning. The predictions were not entirely wrong though, just misinterpreted in their translation. A global change occurred, derailing our affinity to function on auto pilot, with eyes closed, led like lemmings off a ledge. The people woke up and set fires to their property, ceremoniously sacrificing the past for present favours from Gods found within. Our perceptions had changed. Protests ceased as their functions became unnecessary. Influence and coercion were ineffective as truth was now widely accepted as being verified solely from the “mouth of the horse.” The financial elite no longer dictated the ebb and flow of commerce, religion and government, because all of earths dependant’s chose truths that were symbiotic with their own heart’s desires. Relief set in, and emotions teetered to a plateau as the fear began to diminish; but that was just the prologue. That was December 21, 2012.

Mankind had seen itself at its worst. The planet had fallen apart, but it was the reflection of man himself that proved to be the greatest disappointment. Argued to be the instinct for survival, backs had turned upon the pleas of those who were in arms reach of saving. The heavy foot of the strong, the fed, crushed the sternums of cadavers whose fingers food was pried from. The sick was used as kindling for the shivering, and the elderly took on the familiar role of being forsaken. The violence ended, and peace followed. Enemies in ideology embraced one another, calmed by tolerance and indifference. War arms were dismantled and recycled into towering shrines symbolizing the passing of an age. Then the shift began. Poverty and malnourishment devoured the planet. The efforts to distribute evenly the world’s resources were miscalculated. Unemployment was no longer a concern as the vast majority were just that. The farmers, fisherman and hunters replaced the CEO’s and COO’s of finance firms; the new generation of wealth, revisiting old values and standards. The oil barons were left to ingest their own resource as sustenance; their accumulated wealth rendered worthless. The meek had inherited the earth and squandered their windfall as quickly as they had acquired it. The planet was infertile, barren from the domestic elements within her, as were the planet’s male species. Decisions to hold off on reproduction, for fear of bringing life into a world that was believed to be ending, cursed mankind with the inability to create a future. Paranoia had created validation. Where women had been the scapegoat for eating the forbidden fruit, it was the men this time around who would carry the stigma. Life existed because we had created it, and our hiatus, our defiant choice to postpone our natural responsibility caused a paradox, relieving us of any choice. Visions of a utopian age were laid to rest; headstone that bared no script. Carnegie steel crumbled, bringing city skyscapes to their knees; concrete relics, skeletal remains. Metallic dragons were grounded, their wings clipped, haemorrhaging petroleum into parched aqueducts. The earth suffocated under the cascading waves that swallowed them. Segregation of earth and ocean was obsolete; habitable land existing only as an island in the center of the globe. The sky remained, seething bright hues, testaments to its witnesses that miracles were possible, but the confusion and frustration at the delay of the impossible becoming possible ensued.

The dynamics of life had been altered. Man and woman did not cohabitate as they once did. The courtships of harlequin novels had taken a new face, as the cat and mouse game of seduction existed only in the pursuit of women and their Mona Lisa counterparts. The phallic strength of men had turned flaccid, unable to manifest a fraction of a now extinct libido. Women grew tired, wanting more than just the friendships and heart-shaped lockets that could be offered to them, and instead went in search of exasperating their yearnings elsewhere. The male role had been reconfigured. Fathers were a thing of the past, Mother’s a memory. All that roamed the planet were parentless children, the majority over the age of forty. Relationships still survived, though they veered from the traditional, unable to bring new life into the world. In the past sixteen years a new person was not known to have been brought into the world. What technology still existed was not advanced enough to conjure up potions that could correct the problem. Man had walked away from his birthright, but unlike the prodigal son, when his error was recognized and he returned to resume his responsibility, he was surprised to find that his privileges had been revoked. But as is the case with life, the unexpected is always possible and the impossible was trying to sprout roots.

The final chapter was that last seed fighting for existence. What was certain was no more and the threads that mended beliefs and truth together in a patchwork of purpose were skewered to the point of unfamiliarity. The ways of the old guard no longer worked and we didn’t know where to begin, how to begin. We had nothing to inspire the way. Hope was absent, hiding behind the exhaustion of years in peril. The soul had wandered in search of purpose, a degree of care, and was lost on its journey; feared never to return again. There was no pattern, no behavioural blueprint to forecast how and when things would improve. But that paradox that can be defined as naivety or ignorance, the spirit, that soul, returned, holding on for better days. It had prevailed before, and the majority, the elders, believed it would prevail again. This conviction held, unknowingly orchestrating a symphony of rebellion; its crescendo releasing the shackles of centuries old horror stories told by our forefathers. This movement gained momentum from rumours that spread like wildfire about a boy, and returned innocence to the world, upon the world discovering that the boy was born without the sins of the remaining.

Between the mountains, where their toes nestled gently into the earth, was the last remaining archaic archetype of a family. During the years of reproductive standstill one couple took it upon themselves to hold onto the hope that the end of days would not come. Their love for one another, so passionate, ignored the protestations of the naysayers of the world who condemned the man and woman for their selfishness. That final seed from that selfishness grew to be a beautiful baby boy, and quite possibly the new Adam for a generation yet to come. Jealousy and envy forced the family into the exile that they learned to make a life with. Jealousy that stemmed from the misunderstanding of the kind of passion the two held for one another. As the boy grew the parents feared their son may not have been plagued by the inability to father children as all previous men before him had been. He had never been given the opportunity to deny it. The child’s glances at his mother had an Oedipus feel to them, a dualistic love of childlike awe and curious sensuality. By his fourteenth year the boy had chosen to venture out into the world, disobeying his parent’s warnings of the cruelty of those who looked like them outside the walls that protected them. His desire for exploration took him from his parents and into the villages that remained on that center island called the world. His senses grabbed a hold of his body, pulling him in directions that he’d never conceived. His pulse raced upon the vision of more feminine figures like his mother than he could have imagined. Like a camera on a swivel, his head oscillated back and forth, trying desperately to capture all of their faces, committing them to memory. He had felt betrayed by the stories told to him, wondering why the beauty he was experiencing hadn’t been introduced to him earlier.

Women began to take notice of the boy’s obvious physical arousal and were intrigued and confused equally. Stories of a man like him had existed but seeing one in the flesh was unimaginable. Here was this young man, strong and tall, bursting with curiosity, amongst the fallen relics that had long ago held the sky in place. As if the earth had shifted, flocks of women began to approach the man, flirting and seducing him. Women who had forgotten that intimacy with a man, and younger women who had only heard stories about it, pursued the temptation that was the only virile man they’d encountered in years. There was an underscore of hope amongst those who felt there was a possibility for future generations, although the sheer excitement of a tryst trumped even that. Led by the hand of an older woman, she enrolled the young man into an education that he would pervert into an occupation. The romance of intimacy was degraded, clinical, as the young man was passed around, satisfying a duty long ago extinct. A pasture once condemned by drought was now experiencing growth. Women of the planet engaged in the joys of childbearing, and a universal feeling of relief and happiness swept over the globe. But this possibility passed. Caligulistic scenes, as if painted by the hands of Michelangelo, of men and women alike trying to bottle the boy’s virility for themselves failed. Women’s hope of childbirth climaxed at miscarriage, as not a single child came to light. Each encounter ended the same. The boy’s nectar did not satisfy the palate of the eggs inside them. Disappointment returned, with no desire to depart.

Expectation had grasped the global community, uniting them in a common fear; the widespread belief of an external force bringing them to extinction. The landscape had changed, but more importantly so did man’s heart. The undoing of the planet came not from the external forces, but the internal change in men that drove their actions to self destruction. Hopelessness weighed on their shoulders, breaking legs and spine, until they were unable to move, unable to fend for themselves. Eventually the outside forces won, the winters encapsulated them, the cold winds tearing away at the thin layer of flesh that protected their skeletons. Man’s contribution was a majority stakeholder, and no one survived the crash of their most valuable stock; life, though the remainder of shadows tell a different story.