“The future is cancelled.”
The words pierce my heart like a bullet.
Everything feels different once you hear those words.
The nights feel colder. The bed feels lonelier.
I turn on the TV. It’s CNN. Two people dressed in suits
Talking about questions we should have answered decades ago.
Arguing over what should be done to reduce carbon emissions by 2%.
They’re so caught up in the argument that they don’t even stop to ask
If what they’re proposing will actually be enough.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
The conversation never stops. Nothing is ever conclusive.
It’s always “still being looked into.”
Looked into by who? Well, scientists.
And what have they found so far?
Not much, but they say we still have time.
And who do they work for? Who pays them?
Silence. We all know who. Corporations, government funded institutions.
The governments are more honest than the corporations,
But they know what would happen if they told us the truth.
And because they know, they never will tell us
Just how bad things really are.
“The future is cancelled.”
“The future is cancelled.”
Walking along the beach at night, I feel the sand grind beneath my shoes.
Standing here, I feel the sadness of lost dreams
Seep from the ground and into my bones.
My mother grew up playing on this beach
While my grandfather worked in the power plant,
That behemoth of steel and concrete that powers my town and the surrounding cities.
Inside that giant monolith is a complex machine of sorts that generates our power,
By splitting apart atoms and rearranging them… or something. I don’t know how it works.
He worked himself to the bone. And he paid for it in the end.
No good deed will go unpunished.
He worked until he couldn’t work anymore,
Until his back could barely support him.
But in the end, that wasn’t what got him. The cancer did.
A life of work, a few years of pain, and death.
The same life as those before him, who came from Europe
And worked in the quarries
In the very place that I now stand in.
They came for the American Dream,
But all they found was more of the same.
They suffered hoping that their children wouldn’t have to,
And their children did the same.
They kept on going because they thought it would get better
For those who came afterwards.
My great great grandfather, my great grandfather, my grandfather, my mother,
And now me. And it doesn’t look like it’s gonna get any easier. It never does.
“The future is cancelled.”
“The future is cancelled.”
The once clear waters are brown and muddled.
Empty crab shells wash up on shore, a memory of what once was but is no longer.
Shards of shattered glass cut my feet
As I walk barefoot across the sand
Into the new world,
A life that was cancelled before it began.
Nikoli O’Dwyer is a writer that specializes in philosophy, radical politics and occultism of all kinds.