2045: Memoirs From The Future
The excerpt is part of a futuristic book I am writing.
The world has changed a great deal during the last decades. Technology has enabled the things that were considered the domain of gods at the beginning of the century. At the same time, Realpolitik took on a completely new meaning with advanced communities employing all the possible economic levers to secure clean water and breathable air.
At the outset of the new Millennium, all we needed was energy for a human body and transportation means. Poor countries had clean water and medicine shortages added to the equation. With technology and automation becoming a gateway for each advanced civilization, virtually all the states/nations below the poverty line by the 2020s were doomed to deep cross-class divisions.
The two Hunger Waves that struck South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen in the late 2010s, and Malawi, Niger and seafood-dependent Oceania in 2027, became the first cases of massive fatalities since the end of the last World War. The advanced nations of the first half of the 21st century were often blamed for their “late response” to the crises. Nevertheless, history took its turn and it became universally agreed that the doomed nations of Africa and Oceania made a brave first step on the long expected route to depopulation. Powerless hunger-struck Sudanese and Yemeni were now labelled as saint martyrs in the textbooks on Global Sustainability.
Being raised in a post-Socialist country, Maria was not particularly a fan of millions of people dying in hunger cramps for the sake of a “higher mission,” though she understood the advanced nations’ rationale as well. Worldwide coordination of food redistribution artificial intelligence (AI) technology would be tangled in political and economic blockades and create protracted negotiations impeding the natural progress of Capitalism.
The strong of the world had to get stronger to survive and Realpolitik left little place for a win-win scenario. Peoples' subconscious desire to eliminate the source of distress led to a perfectly justified and silent observation of gigantic Hunger Waves as well as a beautifully devised and supportive storyline.
Maria remembered the uncontrollable bursts of tears, depression and remorse that accompanied her during the First Hunger Wave. Any time she read the headlines and watched another emaciated Yemeni baby her heart jumped out of her chest cage and throat only to suffocate in the uncompromising forceps of anxiety mixed with helpless anger.
Both media and the general population knew all too well about the horrendous hunger in Yemen back in 2016 and the world chose to ignore the fact and endow a full-fledged withdrawal from confrontation with Saudi Arabia. The only time world media hinted to a “potential hunger” in Yemen was when thousands of lifeless skeletons depicted in Washington Post newsletters were long dead. People in the developing world were dying in thousands and there was only media attention to bend over their implorations.
As time went by Maria came to hate those emaciated bodies and those hopeful hungry eyes looking at her from the antique magazines of the pre-Equilibrium period. Why were they there in the first place? Why didn’t they try harder to succeed, to spare Maria and thousands of other people from those horrible nightmares and onerous feelings of personal and collective guilt? After all, she did nothing wrong! She wore no fur, rarely ate meat and made every attempt at recycling!
No, they were there. They existed and they looked at you from the old cover pages. They looked with that gaze that used to be naive and hopeful at the beginning of the Wave and were steadily becoming crazy, hollow and absent as mass extinction was decisively taking hold.
They screamed from the main page photos and begged for survival. They begged to be adopted, fed, resuscitated, cared for and given a ticket to life they were denied since birth. These eyes bore all the hope humanity had ever born and all the despair accumulated through Millennia.
Then they disappeared.
It took Maria a long time to turn on that wishful thinking and imagine that receding coverage meant a problem faded away. At the same time, a problem was disappearing, first by hundreds, then millions and then by whole nations. After all, Capitalist Darwinism and geopolitics prevailed.
No time for tears. Time for action. Time for progress.
2045: Long live humanity and God bless all the unfortunate victims and martyrs of the Hunger Waves!
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