It is August 21st, 2055; I’m still alive, keeping quite well and pretty healthy taking into consideration our circumstances.
I fucked up. I fucked up big. I was too greedy and too obsessed with having power, respect, admiration and money. I should have listened to the experts and people who were much more in sync with nature that I ever was, but I didn’t.
I know that pondering upon the past won’t bring the Old World back to what it was. But if by any chance this letter is going to travel back to 1990 as they say it will please sit down, read it carefully and take notice of the story I’m about to tell you.
**MY CLEVERNESS**
I was educated in the most prestigious schools of my time. However, my expensive education didn’t help me develop abstractive and creative thinking and using imagination to solve problems. Nevertheless, when the time was right, I became the Prime Minister.
As a PM I was a strong advocate of the power of mind and progress at all costs regardless of the consequences on the human, emotional or environmental level.
It was never a secret that I took minimal notice of dangers associated with climate change. In fact, I never acknowledged that climate change was a “real thing”. I always believed that life goes in cycles and if Earth was running out of some natural resources it was because we were nearing on a turn and Earth would soon enough bounce back to provide people with more resources or people would find some alternative to what was naturally drying out.
The government I created was careless, corrupted and full of anger and hatred towards anyone who was in the opposition and disagreement with our way of thinking.
**OUR COUNTRY COMES FIRST**
Our political stand was always pretty straightforward and based on two main principals: bringing the money in and giving businesses opportunities to reach new financial highs. I believed that we had created heaven on Earth making all the other nations envious of our social and corporate achievements. Together with my cabinet, we designed tax avoidance schemes to attract big and powerful corporations, and at the same time, we pushed smaller entities out.
We cut all the government expenses which we could cut and sold everything that was there to be sold, including arts, parks and green areas into private hands. We wanted to reduce responsibilities and spending, and that was always our political plan. I convinced myself that I was a minimalistic PM. In reality, I was willing to cash on anything I could cash on.
My primary objective as a PM was to bring more business in, regardless of the costs the future generations were going to pay.
I was proud that so many thousands of people desired to become part of our ever-growing and evolving society. Any social group who didn’t want to conform to our way of living was heavily marginalised. My dream was to create a perfect society. Together with my government, I worked hard to price unworthy element out, everyone who wasn’t on our desired list. We started off in the capital before we implemented that strategy in other parts of the country. Soon enough our capital city was thriving with the financial and corporate sector, movie stars, property developers but not artists, middle-income people and not people from poorer backgrounds or anyone from the working class. We couldn’t care less for people who had to travel for hours to get to work from outside of our magnificent city. We didn’t care that they had no family time. We didn’t care that family as an institution was nearly destroyed when we were in power. Besides, I always believed a family to be a distraction and since I didn’t have any time for my family I expected others to do without theirs too. I was trying to make meaningful and significant changes to our world, and that was my priority.
Of course, I saw the red flags all over our internal and international policies including our environmental agency: heat waves, prolonged winters, lack of rain, extreme weather. It was all happening in front of my very eyes. Together with my government and climate change deniers, we worked hard to convince the general public that all the global warming and climate change worries were merely unreal and the extreme weather conditions were just a phase. At some point, most of us even started to believe in our lies. We, I laughed at the “hippy communities” that were trying to fight my decisions off or live according to the old-fashioned laws of farming, planning or living off the grid. I honestly believed that I was too sophisticated for that kind of backwards thinking. But it turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Back in 2016, the Organization (made out of the greenies, hippies, hackers and other outcasts that were undesired in my perfect society) started releasing damaging information about our business, political and social dealings including illegal water pollution and massive deforestation. I honestly thought that nobody cared what the Organization had to say and I dismissed them as soon as they appeared on our political scene.
However, the Organization grew in strength and started having an impact on specific groups of people. For some reason, the people behind the Organization didn’t want to put profit before people. They had a purpose they believed in, something I never had myself. Soon enough the Organization became a massive problem for the people in both political and business sphere. But I still dismissed the whole movement as the hysterical outcry for attention.
When I finally woke up the planet was divided into the Old World governed and run by us and the New World backed up by the Organization. Even then I still didn’t want to listen to any advice from people who knew better. At the end of the day, I was the leader and leaders always know better.
**WHAT HAPPENED**
Even though, the weather decline was becoming quite obvious none of the “serious” politicians was taking the issue seriously. Opposite to the Organization that became known at first as a movement against human trafficking but quickly was transformed into a movement towards total political change.
It didn’t take the Organization long to divide Earth into two worlds. Our decline was their triumph. Millions of people joined the New World, but also many millions stayed behind in the Old World believing that we could and would change what we fucked up so badly.
For us, the slippery slope began with food shortages caused by the extreme weather we naturally couldn’t control. Farmers tried almost everything to reinvent ways of helping the grains and vegetables to survive, but the rapid temperature changes and unpredictability of the climate didn’t help. The bees proved to be excellent fighters, fighting until the very end. I, as the Prime Minister, allowed the bees were killing peptides to be used on our soil even though I knew what the side effects were. I convinced myself, with significant help from corporations, that the population of bees could be recreated artificially at any time. Some people even created individual greenhouses to keep fruit trees and flowers for the bees to keep them going. Since the natural resources were drying up, it was getting too expensive to keep the greenhouses warm during the cold nights. In the long run, the cold became too hard to beat and soon even the best intentions couldn’t help to keep the food growing. Natural food production stopped on our side of the wall. Another obstacle was the water supply, which became difficult to obtain and control in any way. Whatever water we had left, we couldn’t have possibly been using for farming.
Nevertheless, neither I nor any other leader on our side of the wall was ready or willing to admit a defeat or give up our power; it was never an option. We needed to show the New World that the Old World was doing more than well. From what I have been told there are many empty cities across the Old World reclaimed by nature.
At the moment of this writing people in the Old World either gather around farms trying to survive or live in the tall buildings up in the skies govern and run by the Corporation. I’m one of those people in the tall building.
**CORPORATIONS**
When the land stopped providing us with the essentials I knew that the end was coming but I was still too proud to reach out to the New World and just ask for help. Instead under the corporate pressure, I agreed to turn precious green areas into factories once again convincing myself that I was on the right side of history.
We made work at these factories mandatory for everyone for at least a day a week, but the unemployed had to work forty hours a week. People who worked in the factories were given food in exchange for their time.
The rich were able to buy they turn out from the food factories, and most of them exercised that right. The factories looked like work camps: dirty, smelly, cold and full of hungry and angry people guarded by heavily armed army personnel.
The factories were built fast, but within a few years, there was hardly anyone working in them. People were dying from lack of nutrition (the artificial, plastic food couldn’t provide human bodies with the right nutrition), hunger, extreme weather and extreme temperatures.
**2016 AND BEYOND**
In 2016 a group of anarchists called the Organization wanted to take matters into their own hands and decided to create a New World. The leader of the Organization managed to come to some arrangement with some poorer and much less developed countries to build a utopian society. I was the non-believer until I climbed over the wall and saw it with my own eyes that the change was possible.
The reality on our side of the wall was very bleak. The food shortage drove some governments to drastic measures, which included killing “unwanted” and “undesired” people and keeping only the ones that somehow could contribute towards building a better future. They did save a lot of food this way but not enough to keep the brilliant minds in the Old World.
A new group of people emerged from this devastation called, The Travellers. The Travellers moved around the world on both sides of the wall trying to bring in and distribute food from the New World.
With the help of the New World, some of the communities in the Old World were able to survive and help bees to reproduce, but I don’t know how much of this was true and where these communities were in the Old World. At least this is what some of the captured Travellers told us. My government banned Travellers, and if caught they ended up in prisons just in case the New World was planning some revolution in the Old World. I had never requested anything formally from the New World’s government, so the Travellers in my eyes were the real threat to our way of living. I happily put my trust in corporations, armies and dictatorship just to hold on to the illusion of the power I once had.
**CONCLUSION**
Lack of cooperation between people, selfishness of many leaders including myself, short-sighted decisions, extreme weather conditions and almost total extinction of the bee caused by pollution and pesticides killed what we loved the most.
Ego and pride is a real threat to our way of living.
**THE LETTER**
I have no idea how this letter will get to your hands. I was asked to write something that could travel in time to give you a warning for the future. I sincerely hope that whoever gets this letter will be much smarter than I have ever been and will listen to wiser people than the political class. If you listen and take appropriate action fast, you will be able to save Earth without having to divide us. Just pay attention and put aside differences. There is only one goal – to preserve planet Earth.
I beg you.
Yours Truly,
Jason Footknacker
PS.
Keep checking the box I’m told more letters will come.