Death by a Thousand Cuts

As a nation, we marched in this direction for years, still it caught everyone off guard. It started with weed. Thirty-seven states already legalized it. Four more headed in that direction. Lots of talk during the months before the election of repealing the federal law altogether—no one enforced it anyway. As soon as he took office, he showed his hand. He reclassified marijuana and other recreational drug use as a class one felony, on par with murder and rape. Minor offenses like shoplifting, indecency, and public drunkenness were now punished by caning. The uproar was deafening, but his party controlled all branches of government, including judicial. He unveiled Project 2029. Burning flags, drinking alcohol, homosexuality, “smut’ in books, profanity, and protests; it all became illegal…

A writers’ prompt set me in motion: “In a single vote, they outlawed technology…” When you read that prompt, do you conjure Atwood’s A Handmaids Tale? Orwell’s 1984? I do. I headed straight toward dystopia—autocracy and authoritarian regimes. After blasting out that opening paragraph in a word-vomit crush, I changed course. I gave up on fiction and focused on my obsession with the worst-case-scenario.

In my twenties and thirties, dystopia was my jam. I hunted down every post-apocalyptic novel I could find. I’m not even sure it was a recognized genre yet. Lucifer’s Hammer (comet strikes Earth), Earth Abides (pandemic strikes earth), The Rift (earthquake), The Stand (another pandemic), On the Beach (nuclear holocaust), I am Legend (pandemic) and so on. When Goodreads launched, I joined a reading group called Apocalypse, Whenever.

I enjoyed these accounts about people overcoming large-scale societal problems. Skating along by the seat of their pants, fighting for good against evil, rebuilding the broken world. In my forties and fifties, climate change novels entered the mix—World Made by Hand, Parable of the Sower, everything by Kim Stanley Robinson.

One of the most sobering things I’ve ever read is Robinson’s opening chapter of The Ministry for the Future. In Uttar Pradesh, India, the heat and humidity rise to unprecedented levels. It lacks the drama of a rock crashing through the atmosphere or a pandemic whipping across the globe like a wildfire fanned by a hurricane. In Uttar Pradesh, it simply gets hotter than usual, and then hotter than that. Tens of thousands of people bake to death over the course of a week. It’s so plausibly written, I’m sort of shocked it hasn’t happened yet.

I’m learning that unlike the novels I’ve read, the apocalypse happens in slow motion. It isn’t a super flu that arises in all corners of the earth simultaneously. It’s a Bird Flu and then Zika and then Covid and then M-pox and then Sloth Fever, one after another, each building upon the havoc of the last. It’s Listeria and Salmonella and E-coli and MRSA and Strep. Every outbreak wearing us down.

It isn’t a sudden release of all the methane stored under the ocean causing global temperatures to spike by thirty degrees. It’s a few extra hurricanes a year. It’s back-to-back active wildfire seasons. It’s slowly rising tides, and thousand-year storms causing annual floods. It’s overloaded electrical grids and summer-long droughts.

It isn’t the super volcano under Yellowstone National Park exploding in an atmosphere-clotting cataclysm sending society into another ice age. It’s the erosion of rights, the spread of hatred and isms and phobias. It’s mounting debt, closed borders and America first. It’s a pining for a return to a white, Christian nation.

The apocalypse is death by a thousand cuts.

Years ago, I laid in bed at night anxious about how my family would survive in a post-apocalyptic world. I worried that an accountant and a fundraiser lacked any useful skills in the coming dystopian society. Now I realize the apocalypse has already happened. It’s happening right now, and it will continue to happen tomorrow. All these individual setbacks taken together are crushing society.

My daughter Sophie studied wildlife biology at the University of Vermont. She once told me that the biggest threat to the Vermont moose population was ticks. A single Vermont moose hosts on average 47,000 ticks. Seventy-four percent of moose in Vermont die from blood loss due to ticks. It isn’t going to be the big one—a super volcano or a meteor—that takes us down. It’s the 47,000 little things that are happening all around us right now that will do us in.

—

Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.

—

Photo credit: iStock