A Springtime Vow

The first green of the new spring is breaking through the snow, slowly shaking off winter’s deathly embrace. For some reason, it catches me off guard, that patch of colour among the fading, stained white. Never the pristine white of my youth, not in an age. But still snow, and safe enough for the children to play it.

Watching my grandson stoop and stare at that patch of green, grinning as he touched the first delicate blades of spring grass, I had a sudden memory of his father. A serious boy, born into serious times. From his earliest days he had been fascinated with all the world, but hardly allowed to touch it.

Not so with his son, who now watched green things grow. It was amazing how, in so short a time, the world had begun to heal itself.

Hard, painful work and determination had brought us to this point. A collection of cooler heads feverishly pouring secret personal fortunes into researching answers had saved us, though at a cost numbered in billions.

Somehow, the messaging got through the heads of those few who commanded the resources of millions. And they, in fear for themselves as they saw their world spiraling out of control, dedicated those resources to not just preservation, but reclamation. In secret, as all things involving such vast investments must be kept so they thought, they build and programed and prototyped and stockpiled.

And when the bombs fell, when the armies marched, when winters and radiations that should have destroyed all life covered the Earth, those technologies persisted. The wealthy who survived were largely hunted down, but those who had taken these steps in secret and survived the upheavals, released their creations.

Hard was the lesson that one cannot be king, if all one has to rule is the ashes. Dominion over a field of bones is dominion still, but a hollow, lonely kind of kingship.

Those hidden wonders caused their own version of an uproar. Their own sparks of conflict as factions surrounding the places where they had been safely stored, began to vie for their dominance. The infection of war that no human soul can ever be freed from still hungered for control. Yet, it did not occur.

Certain places fell, certain bastions of new potential were lost to the teeth of a machine not yet dead. But it was not all of them. Nor yet was it most. And all reservoirs contained within their walls all that the others could distribute. No one was set above the others in terms of its contents, nor yet were any set behind.

It is a definite truth that many of the wealthy who built these bastions thought of them as being of benefit to their own people. Others for reason of their skin, religion, or distance left damned so far as that one person was concerned, but none had the influence to deny any construction.

And due to the focus of conflict against those deemed most harmful by one side, the fewest destroyed vaults were in the least developed places. Why waste ordinance against illiterates half-way across the planet, when your greatest foe stands on your door with sons a plenty to sacrifice?

I was lucky, despite the horrors that have defined my life. Neither myself, nor my son were of proper age when the conscription orders came down. Neither of us were considered enough of a threat when the Yanks invaded. Nor were we considered undesirable when their morality police came knocking.

Lucky to watch our neighbours burn as the self-righteous celebrated. Lucky to be ignored by the retaliations when anyone wearing a tri-coloured armband was hanged. Lucky to be employed in a war necessary field when the orders to march on Washington came down, after the Mexican retaliation for the invasion and genocide in Sonora.

Hard years, when the countries that survived the first nuclear strikes before civil war tore Russia apart, and the Sino-Indian war devastated Asia. But still we survived. After a fashion. But it was not living.

My son volunteered to join the Reclamation Forces. Working diligently to cleanse the radio-active wasteland that was New England and California. A noble mission that killed him far before his time. But knowing, I don’t think he died with a smile on his lips. Rather he died with that look of grim determination that the negligence of the world that raised me had painted on his face all his life.

I don’t know whether I should curse or bless the unknown names of the wealthy who thought to provide us with the means of bringing forth the new green I now watch my grandson enjoy. I don’t know if they would have done better to work on preventing the conflagration that destroyed all that had come before. I don’t know if their doing so would have made a difference.

No statues are built to them. But we have them for the researchers who invented the means of saving the world. The people who worked diligently, whether for selfish or selfless motivations, to save us all in the ultimately inevitable case that we failed to save ourselves.

I don’t even know how much I am to blame for the dead. For the world that ate my son even as he tried to save it. But I do know the costs of not taking what responsibility is mine.

Already, in the world today, I can see the rise of powers that already destroyed us. They are easy answers, considered broadly safe answers, the kind of answers that mean those who choose them get to step back. Get to say that it’s not their fault. Get the freedom to say that they were only following orders.

Other people see what I see, however. I am not alone.

The more that I think about the world that was, the world we lost, the more I realize that we were never alone in any of it. The persons who seek to destroy without thought for those that come after are natural, they are in evitable. We will not and cannot simply teach or breed it out of the population. It must be confronted, and it must be stopped.

Luckily, I think, with our newer more representative democracies still young, we are in a position to stop them. Watching my grandson marvel at new green that most pre-war calculations suggested would still be at least a century away, I think I understand at last what I owe to the world. I finally see that, lucky though my family was, I had embraced that worst kind of freedom.

Throwing my vote away without thought for how a two party state could be improved, I accepted their authority. Surrendered my own agency in the world by trying to muddle through, and hope for the best.

If I, and everyone else in my position had taken action earlier, we could have done great things without bloodshed. War might be a never-ending failing of the human condition, but if it can be prevented, held off for longer and longer each time, then one day we might forget how to wage it.

Watching my grandson, I make a silent vow that I should have made decades before. A promise that it should not have taken the death of my son and corruption of the planet to draw from me.

“I will take my responsibility seriously.”

If everyone is like me, if everyone takes their stand to dismantle what must be dismantled and repair what must be repaired, then 2050 will be a joyful thing.