Day Twenty-Three and the PRE (post-apocalypse)

I used to love post-apocalypse stories.

Fahrenheit 451, 12 Monkeys, The Flintstones (trust me on that last one because there IS a THEORY). Hell, do you realize that even Star Trek is, in its deepest origin story, a post-apocalyptic fairy tail. I used to love all of these.

Until a couple of days ago, when a meme came across my socials.

A meme that I just spent an hour digging through other memes, hoping to find, without any luck. In fuzzy recollection, the lost meme went something like this,

“What if we’re already in the apocalypse?”

Take all the time you need with that, just like I did. Don’t rush. Let it breathe. Okay, good. Now ask yourself, just like I did, what if we’re living through, right now, in late November of 2023, NOT just humanity’s latest hiccup, but the actual beginning of the end? I know, there isn’t much CHEER in that thought. I mean, consider that, outside of the cozy fringes of what we, here, call Thanksgiving, are we really just giving thanks for one more blindfold to hide our eyes with?

And no, I don’t care if what you’ve read so far makes you stop reading and start blocking.

Remember that Rome had its Pax Romana and its Bread and Circuses (that last phrase was also a Star Trek episode title, by the way), and Rome was also history’s cool kid on the block for at least 500 years. Even started kicking up its heels a good five or six-hundred years prior to that, before it crumbled on the inside, and then burned on the outside.

We here in the land of turkeys on the fourth Thursday of that month which ushers in our annual seasonal depression, have only been the cool kid on history’s block since that time we bloodied the nose of a bully in a war that ended barely 200 years ago. And since that time, we’ve copied everything we learned from that childhood bully, and then even improved the shit out of a lot of his techniques.

We even copied Rome, and its self-proclaimed Peace, plus its offering of Bread and Circuses, when we crafted our own versions through things like Manifest Destiny and the National Football League. And for every culture that got to experience our manifest, it was, for them, the apocalypse.

So why would we ever think that THE apocalypse couldn’t have its very own origin story… in us? One in which those, once bullied to near-extinction, live long enough to become the bullies of someone else’s end times.

So, while naming no names, and only using well-established histories to make a point for my old favorite Sci-Fi trope, realize that Rome, which wasn’t built in a day, rules the world no more. Great Britain, upon who’s empire, as they themselves used to say, “the sun never sets”, is now little more than the world’s doddering great-grandmum, sitting in a corner, drooling over the smells of turkey roasting in the oven. Just a reminder that history repeats itself often, whether or not we who are alive for it, learn from it.

And momentarily rest in the knowledge that, though history is written by the victors, history also teaches that, eventually, the victors are no more. Then, history will be spoken by those who survived, and live on in what those who would have written, might have called the pre-post-apocalypse.

Oh, and I prefer ham to turkey, and would eat mashed potatoes every day of the year.

Talk to you tomorrow.

(probably)