Our spirits and bodies were crippled. We felt helpless, defeated. But something happened. Something changed. Something clicked and our eyes opened and we saw each other and woke up and realized what we could do.
I organized the thing but it wasn’t me. It was us. And it still is despite everything.
Most of the world had lost the capacity for empathy. They were hypnotized by money, by a system that commoditized everything, even people.
They were asleep and we had awoken. We had an advantage and we decided to use it. We saw the climate destruction. We saw the pettiness, the greed. We saw the big undeserving egos. We saw the sun and the sky and the mountains. Grass and leaves and squirrels and birds. We felt the earthquakes. The present was present and the future was clearly and frighteningly visible.
Ernesto felt odd, uncomfortable. He read the papers and scanned the Internet and consequently knew nothing. But he sensed something. Something odd and perhaps wrong.
He watch the group in the park. Unwashed. Carrying soiled bags. Talking quietly among themselves. They were the losers, unlike Ernesto who was clearly a winner. He drove his Lexus back to his familiar and comfortable mansion. But he couldn’t get the image out of his head. Those people were loitering in his neighborhood park, where his children played—until recently. He would have called the cops again but the vagrants weren’t actually breaking the law. The police would question them but had no grounds to take them in.
Ernesto grabbed his golf gear and went out to the club for yet another round.
While he was doing that, I addressed our group in the park. You can call me by my nickname, Bilbo. Everybody does.
“All of you probably know what I’m gong to say. We’ve all been thinking about the same things. But it needs to be said aloud.”
The group watched quietly, politely. But they obviously wanted to get on with it.
“Friends, for we are all friends, aren’t we? Friends, today we emerge. We become visible not as outcasts but as people. As people who are central figures of our species and critical to the future of our planet. Because our planet and the souls of its inhabitants are in danger, a danger that they see yet refuse to acknowledge. They ignore reality because they believe they have too much to lose. In fact, they have nothing, just as we have nothing—except each other.”
They stood tall in a geometric pattern. If I remember my high school geometry, it was a tetrahedron. I continued.
“You know what to do. Good luck. Let’s go.”
They moved away, confidently in small groups going in different directions. We knew it wasn’t happening just at this park, but at thousands of parks worldwide.
Me and my friends sabotaged fossil fuel plants. We closed cruel factories using our bodies as weapons. And my people questioned ordinary working people everywhere; they asked “Are you really gong to spend your life doing that?” Some of those people actually began to think, to question what they were doing and why. Some stopped going to work. Some became activists themselves.
Ernesto didn’t like it one bit. Three of them heading his way, on the golf course, a private course. Those guys needed to learn their place. The world was fine, at least Ernesto’s was, until those guys came strolling towards him. Hey, everybody’s pretty comfortable if not happy with the world as it is, right? Yeah, it’s a little warmer and the planet is misbehaving a bit, but there’s always gonna be trouble, isn’t there?
I was one of the three guys at that golf course. My side was winning and was gonna win. We were too smart, too numerous, too determined and we had reality on our side. Fender said “I’ll take care of this, Bilbo.”
We’d seen a lot of resistance, a lot of trouble. Still, I was shocked when the golfer took his first brutal swing. Fender went down.There was a lot of blood. Even if there isn’t a hell, that bastard is going there.
The battle continues. When the planet is saved, we’ll have a large number of martyrs to remember. Humanity is beginning to recover its humanity, but at a horrible cost.