The End

THIS CONCLUDES TINA’S BLOG.  BUT STAY TUNED FOR INTERVIEWS, EPILOGUES, and OTHER POSTS OF GREAT IMPORT!

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This is what humanity is like, twenty years after the Collapse.

There are no trains, no airplanes.  Everyone lives with everyone on earth that they care about, so no one ever misses anyone.  The air is cleaner than it’s been for two centuries.

The only technology that still exists is for better agriculture.  Everyone farms, and no one is hungry.

There are no schools.  Everyone studies what they want, anything in the world, to enrich and entertain.  No one has to pick a major, devote their life to one thing.  There is time for everything.

There are no televisions.  Everyone works and plays outside and eats the crops that their town grew.  No one needs to watch for organic labels or trans fats.  No one is obese.

There are no cities.  The town is the new unit of support and love, and it looks over each of its members.  Every child has dozens of parents, and if one of them is not doing his or her job properly, there are dozens to pick up the slack.

There are no psychiatrists.  There are no counselors.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, somewhere along the line, someone realized how many problems of the world would be solved if everyone wasn’t angry at each other all the time.  Second, the towns know how to look after those who need extra help.  No one is alone or shut off, and that will solve any number of problems.

There are doctors and scholars, and someday soon they shall use the internet to share knowledge, equipment, inventions.  The elderly do not wish to live to be a hundred now – but they have techniques improve the lives of the young.  Humanity will look after its own.

There are no countries.  I know, how John Lennon of us.  There is no war.  There is no money.  There is no poverty.  There are some possessions, but they are much the same as the ones any other family has, so there is no theft.

There is no crime.  There is nothing built into the system to avoid crime, except that people are tired of it and so they do not do it.

There are no races.  People still have different color skins, but no one cares.  There are no dress codes.  There is gender, but it is generally acknowledged to be as fluid as it always was.  There is no sexuality, and anyone may love anyone.  Since there are fewer repressions, there are fewer neurotics, but the town and neighbors are there to intervene in cases of relationships that are or grow unhealthy.

There is lots of dancing.  There is storytelling.  There is still widespread effective contraception, and there is lots and lots of sex, casual sex with many partners, or lifetime sex with just one person.  There are plenty of books, the old-fashioned books with paper, more books than anyone could ever read in a lifetime, though many people try.

There is lots of learning.  There is eating meat, juicy steaks and hamburgers.  There is lots of cooking.  There is plenty of old-fashioned romance, of two people meeting and falling in love, except that there is no marriage and monogamy is not a status symbol, so only the ones who are really interested go for it.

There are still break-ups, and fights, and people sometimes shout or throw things or claim that their neighbor is absolutely terrible at sophisticated literary analysis.  And yes, people do regularly commit all of the seven deadly original sins and break all of the ten commandments, even the really bad ones.  There is still tragedy, still pain, still disappointment, still unimaginable grief.

There is still death.

Everywhere, people work to improve on the utopia, to iron out the kinks, and argue about the best way of getting everyone to love each other, really, truly and for all time.

The sun beats down on the world without countries, at the humanity that had to rip out its own heart before it could invent the technologies and the ideas and the art which would teach it how to be kind.  Humanity does not regret the past, the countless millenia of war and violence and haphazard creation which let it grow up.  But it is done with them.  It is time to look after its own.

There is happiness.  I have never seen so much happiness.