I wonder a lot about the future, which is why I was so glad I got to write out my thoughts about it. I’m not a scientific genius, but I do have enough smarts to predict what’s going to happen if we can’t live above ground, or the ground is ruined by radiation. Unlike Fallout 3, there is a brighter future underground, because we don’t have to live socially any different than we do now. It’s our physical limitations as humans that bind us to a huge problem, a lot of whom don’t see there being one and won’t do what’s necessary until their house explodes or there’s a food shortage because our farmland has been nuked.

A lot has been written about our dystopian futures, but it’s all fiction. We’ve never stopped to think about what would happen if we were faced with nuclear war or natural devastation. If the United States is attacked with a nuclear bomb, it would take the ground around it a hundred years to be fertile again. Nuclear treaties keep the world safe for a number of reasons, mostly because world leaders are not able to starve their own people or others if NATO is any threat at all. The immediacy of nuclear war would kill people right away. No one thinks about the fact that their grandchildren and great grandchildren may not get enough to eat because there’s not enough soil unaffected by radiation.

It’s not just bombs. Nuclear power is a wonderful thing right up until it’s not. Things go wrong at plants with the best laid plans. We can’t ignore these things, we have to find a way to successfully live around it. Leaders who wrestle with nuclear war are only thinking in the moment, and I cannot fathom what that discussion was like during WWII, particularly among the Japanese after they didn’t know what hit them.

By the same token, they’re responsible for their own radiation leaks with plants like Fukushima. That’s not to say that nuclear plants are bad and we should get rid of them. Just that for now the technology and chemistry is not capable of defeating human error.

People aren’t capable of acting as smart as they are under the best of circumstances, and the level of intelligence in the room goes down the more people are in it. Groupthink is a powerful drug, as evidenced by the former president’s lovely mugshot. We cannot defeat global warming with anti-vaxxers. It cannot be done if they can’t be convinced that science is real, vaccines are real, and global warming is not a hoax just to fuck with them.

Scientists are not saying that the globe is heating up and will get warmer consistently. They are saying that as the planet heats up, the swings in temperature, air currents, and water level will create chaos. We are not slowly getting warmer at a rate where everything happens concurrently. We are adjusting to a new reality…….. poorly.

The worst part is feeling the politics of all this. Other countries are so much more aware than we are, and so much money goes into making sure we’re as environmentally disastrous as we can possibly be for way longer than we can afford. The oil and gas industry own the United States and we cannot pretend it doesn’t. All climate change policy has to pass based on interest, and they buy out all the votes they want. If you want to grease the wheel, you will. who cares whether it’s legal or not?

We are not the only ones in the world that have a corrupt government, but we’re one of the countries that can do something about it because we aren’t beholden to a monarchy or a despot (anymore). We are also not the only country leaning toward the fascist right, which generally leads to deregulation of all sorts of things. We cannot afford to move backwards, and currently not enough of us are voting forwards. It’s not just the presidency. It’s the congress and local politicians down to the school board. The entire country is centered around who believes facts and who doesn’t. We found out who would justify civil war and who wouldn’t….. and what we found is “more than you might think.” Are we really going to wait until there’s a section of the military that’s on board with a coup? Because this is how you get a coup de etat. It’s not the difference between supporters and non-supporters of the orange gelatinous shitbag, it’s between the people who pick a side and who don’t. If we don’t vote out fascism, we’re going to get it.

I cannot live under that regime. No person of color or queer can. So far, we have no way in some states to advance representation to the smallest degree. The state of Arkansas just passed a ban that high school students cannot take African American history in high school to count for college credit because it might be some sort of indoctrination. “Heather Has Two Mommies” is not welcome in any Florida classroom. I would suggest, before people ban books about persons of color or minority sexual orientation/gender, that they go back to Emett Till. This covers both bases. People can still be killed for whistling at a woman for being black or same sex. Violence against lesbians is very real, although men are more likely to rape us than hit us.

Emett’s story encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our society, as well as what is right in terms of what his legacy has created. I just think it needs to create more by white people recognizing that this country is very much not what they think it is. That’s because all communication in telling the majority they’re wrong is being banned as well. Voting rights in Georgia come to mind.

Perhaps it would be easier to work together on future problems if we weren’t so busy actively trying to destroy each other. The environment is not just physical. Safety doesn’t always correspond to the physical structure you’re in. Sometimes, it’s a feeling. Safety in our society is falling by the wayside. Even the cops are in on it.

Those who study history are desperate for those who don’t to get a clue, but politicians have no idea how to get ahead in the system while also changing it. The government is not built for quick change, and I think that’s mostly good because too much change with this large a population would break most people trying to keep up. That being said, it’s time for more than what we’ve been getting. The planet is getting sicker and only one party cares. Other countries care so much more than we do that we’re an embarrassment.

That’s probably because we don’t have Eisenhower taxes coming in anymore. Government research is not being funded to the level it could be thanks to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Yes, Bill Gates has a foundation, but it’s not exclusively working on American infrastructure like the country would be able to if the same money came to us in the form of tax. We could spend more on climate change because we have money. But, of course, going to space on a vacation is much more important than funding grants for science and technology research.

We don’t even have government-funded health care, and even with our population we have the money to get it done…. we just won’t. Yet prescription drugs are lower in cost everywhere in the world because buying in bulk for the whole nation makes it where drug companies are only getting a set amount of money for them and not jacking up the price in different areas. There is a marked difference between drug prices even doing the research at home on your own. If you call three different pharmacies, you’re going to get three different answers…. except on over the counter meds. They seem to be about the same price no matter where you go because there’s only so much you can charge for paracetamol.

The question becomes which problem to work on first? It’s people. Nothing happens without buy-in, and we are lost to figure out how to create it.

Meanwhile, we make movies to highlight all the hypocrisy. The reason it’s not getting through is that people either think it doesn’t apply to them or the message is being written off as leftist propaganda.

We had a good thing going in the 50s in terms of the space race and figuring out how to adapt society to move forward. The thing that didn’t is the people. All the racism is still here. All the homophobia is still here. Everything that needs to be weeded out never left, it just went dormant.

You can fix the technology, but you can’t defeat stupid.

As the National Park Service says, “it’s hard to make containers to keep bears out. There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist.”

I think that’s a lesson from which we can all learn.