Message from the Future III

 The start of my life as a twentysomething was defined by periods of political, social, and environmental unrest. Even before my first vote in the 2016 election there was a building movement in the younger generation to find our place and speak ourselves into existence as a looming force with ideas and a need for change. The momentum from years of human rights attacks found its release in the farce that was 2020. As everyone is learning in school now, the events of 2020 uncovered the worst in us as a country, from the broken police systems to the inability to care for others in both the present and the future. All of this came to the surface in time for the election. With the president’s support of white supremacist groups  and trigger- happy police and his refusal to protect citizens from a plague, his loyal followers were beginning to lose the misplaced faith they held in him in the beginning of his term.  

At the same time the president’s supporters were beginning to stray from him, my generation flocked in waves to show up and show that we would be the future. We were seen as some sort of novel at first, like all of us were impressionable puppets who heard an idea and latched onto it and would soon move on. And some of us would. Plenty of people claimed to support a cause because that’s what was the next cool thing to do. Others, though, were endowed with special power to turn concerns into ideas, ideas into movement. There was no chaotic upheaval of government like so many of us would have liked. It was a slow process, waiting for older politicians to cycle out of power so we could replace them.  

When our government finally figured out how to properly separate church and state and our leaders were an accurate representation of the general public, we could begin to rewrite our ideals as a country and find ourselves on equal footing with each other. We could offer the then-existing police the option to receive specialized training in psychology and de-escalation so there was always the right person with the right training to care for the community.  

All the deaths we saw with the pandemic didn’t stop our population growth, so America, previously a country of citizens who loved to grow grass, developed programs to support more community farms, reducing environmental effect from transport and constant heavy machinery. There was backlash when it was suggested that we switch and replace building horizontally with building vertically in order to make space for solar power, maybe because America was founded by men whose pride was measured in acres. 

In 2023, after the rest of the world had moved on and no one in the US had legally left the country for two years, there was a shift. Perhaps it was the fact that inter-country travel was finally allowed for everyone except us. Perhaps when the entire world, excluding us, had gone a month with no recorded cases people started to believe in the science of disease spread. Up to that point, no amount of policy or attempted police enforcement of social distancing worked. Perhaps our newfound commitment to quarantine came from America’s aching need to have the good thing someone else had first.

Later that year, after a month of no new recorded cases globally, it was finally time to rejoice. 

My hope as an old lady who survived the plague is that anyone reading this finds comfort in the types of communities that we tried to create despite underestimating how low a years-long pandemic could find you. Some of us always wanted to implement those environmental plans that would uproot everything and just start over, but perhaps it was never realistic to convince a tradition-loving country to make such an extreme switch. Please do not let our folly discourage you to keep pushing for yourselves and each other.