Greetings again, dear Reader from the Future.

I must apologize for my earlier verbosity… as a trader, I normally must carefully measure my words when convincing some farmer to buy my tools or sell me his produce at a certain price. But when permitted opportunity to expound on things past, I tend to forget any sense of brevity.

Moreover, I suspect I may have troubled you with all the ink and wax spent detailing my inner bothers over our generational gaps and conflicts. I pray, dear reader, that you have been willing to look over that, as here I shall talk of the things I have seen or heard of, rather than those of my fathers or my familial quirks.

On politics beyond North America:

Now I suppose that there is still a Windsor to sit on the British throne, or perhaps a Hohenzollern who would be King of Prussia, though that poor throne had been trampled under foot long before the days of my grandfather’s grandfather; of what happens in Europa I could only speculate on, only to know that a certain pretender has made loud claims to being “Petrus Romanus, the “Lord of the Romans”, and of what remains of Christians. Whatever that means. The only noteworthy thing I ever heard from England was that the moon-god cultists were forbidden from landing in there on pain of death. Likewise, France, and particularly its capital, were once nearly overrun with those cultists, and “Le Front National” may have become the author of atrocities unimaginable against the Mohammedan cultists.

I have heard of similar unsavory things which the German speaking nations of Europe have done to the Turks in their midst, though had heard on the wireless shortwave that rather than slaughtering them outright as the French had done to their population, the Germans had offered a period of amnesty for all the moon-god worshipers to leave their lands, which a good many of them did leave. The Norwegians and Swedes, on the other hand, were unparalleled in their revenge against the Islamic invaders who had tormented their nations with all manner of rapes and beatings pon their youth of either gender, in the years leading up to the Great Purge. As a child, I remember hearing those wireless broadcasts whenever the electricity would work, of the impalements and burnings and streetlight after streetlight lined with hanged Musselmen.

Little is known today of Russia, beyond her use of nuclear weaponry one time to annihilate the Muslim holy cities during their high holy days, sending upwards of ten or twelve million those moon-god worshiping cultists to a fiery hell. They largely keep to themselves, with the Kievans, the Minksies and Muscovites trading largely amongst themselves and the few cities that remained in East Europa after the Plague of 2042. On the other hand, there might be a Russian or Ikrayni sitting around a campfire near his steamwagon wondering what became of the once high-and-mighty Yanks. We certainly do not have the world influence we used to.

The Middle East is mostly depopulated, save for the Turks, who have turned to older tribal gods as the worship of Allah fell by the way. Elsewhere, the old black gold has long since become too difficult to extract, and who the radiation had not killed off, the rest largely reverted to ancient tribalisms or removed themselves to other cultures, where such could be done without arousing suspicion.

This is not to say that Islam has disappeared; it as simply been altered in one place, or made ineffective somewhere else. With out the magical moon rock to prostrate themselves to five times each day, reduced to radioactive slag… their god was unable to protect them or itself.

Moving onward… Africa is what it always has been - a hellhole of murder and mayhem… and we of the once developed world, have largely rejoined them in ancient savagery.

In Latin America, it is hard to tell what has happened there; I suspect things are not altogether different, though much of the market here for their pharmaceuticals has dried up due to the ongoing hostilities with the Aztecas and the MaraSalvistas. In fact, anything coming out of Latin America has to pass through Azteca hands, so the reliability of anything coming up from there is questionable.

Brazil seems to be surviving, as I hear tell that they have a small export market for ethanol, which burns a bit more powerfully than the black slime we used to cook up from the oil shale rocks, or the green slime (also not quite oil, but distillable into a type of bang-juice) we now grow in glass towers. They have an advantage with being in the tropics where sugar cane grows like grass here; but we can grow a lot of green slime which can cook up about 200 gallons of bang juice per tower per year, and is about as good as the Brazilian hooch.

That hooch though, is still a bit better than the black slime which we used to make between here and Estes Park (before it was destroyed) from shale, which took almost as much bang juice to cook off the shale rocks as could be gotten from a drum of black slime, nearly a 1:1 exchange … and both are far better than corn ethanol, which everyone older than five considers to be about the stupidest idea anyone ever came up with, short of jumping off of a bridge. These days, ruining a corn harvest will about near get you the death penalty.

The Caribbean, and particularly Cuba, has done surprisingly well. It has become the shipping hub of the Gulf Coast and even into old Republic ports once more, and with them keeping helping the Canal open after the Mayan Revolutionary Crisis along with a handful of Republic missile destroyers still serving well after their original life-expectancy, Cuba is quite the star of the seas, and a major regional power. Apparently, Cuba had long been able to subsist without foreign gas, and though it had shacked up with Venezuela’s Presidente Eternal (some stupid slug descended from the first wretch to hold that title by the name of Chavez) for a few decades, eventually the Castroistas that had long ruled the isle were replaced by a more republican form of government. Their economy is easily on a par with the total of the remaining cities identifying themselves as part of the old Republic, and possibly their northern trading partners in Quebec and the New Maritime States as well, to say nothing of the other lesser Caribean city-states that benefit from Cuba’s success.

And to think I might have had a stake in some of that had I took up that offer to migrate back to the Republic… I could possibly be calling a villa with an actual flush toilet in Havana home instead of circuiting between several sod or wood hovels with outdoor privies. But that would have meant having to survive for a time under one of the petty tyrants that the remnant of the old Federal Government had installed over the remaining cities, or under one of the warlords that “protected” the smaller cities at the fringes of the old Republic, until I had found a way to Havana.

Across the Great Peaceful Ocean in the West, one may hear tales of another empire that once was truly great in turns since antiquity, then fallen during the rise of the Western powers, and once more ascendant in the closing days of cheap and abundant oil fuel, only to finally be broken up into several very angry, and very hungry territories held by warlords with missiles and nobody to really use them on, though Beijing itself had been immolated by one or more rebel commanders seeking to destroy the children of Mao once and for all.

Another rumour had it that the Japanese had in those last heady days of food wars and resource wars turned toward the weapon that had once laid her bare before the old Republic, and used it on China’s Great City as a dread warning not to pillage Japan, but I am not sure if I can accept that: for the Japanese suffered greatly during the Food Wars, their population nearly quartered for want of rice and fish and fresh water, and their cities then clogged to overflowing as their port cities were inundated with meltwater from the poles. More or less cut off from fuel, and with a pacifist principle that was put aside altogether too late, they once more turned inward to isolation, and very little is heard from that land… though, being in part Japanese myself, I suppose one day I might test that whispered rumour that while quite isolationist, Japan still welcomes her sons in the interest of rebuilding her population. You see, when the end of cheap oil and all that came with it finally arrived, most Japanese were well over practical child-rearing age, and actually quite elderly.

It is no exaggeration that the famines preyed quite heavily on the elderly, many of whom willingly starved themselves for the benefit of the younger, but the famines and related diseases also took a far more disproportionate share of the children, and young adults and healthier Japanese as well. I am unsure of how they are, as the Japanese internet has long since been lost by satellite (they fell to the earth long before I was born) and is longer connected by transoceanic cable; I haven’t heard from Uncle Takeo and Aunt Michiko in quite a number of years now, not discounting the time it takes to cross the ocean, much less traffic in mail over several varyingly hostile territories.

Now, though I promised not to prattle on about generational issues, I must pause to reflect on the differences in culture: the Asian cultures, and especially the Japanese, tend to honour age with a far greater degree of esteem than we do here in the West. In no more case was this evident during the early years of the Great Downturning, where many of us set ourselves to the butchery of our elders, and then to those not of our ethnicity near to us, the Asians (particularly the Japanese) did no such thing. Rather, the elders there took it upon themselves largely to sacrifice themselves by taking no food that the youngest children might live, and then also for the survival of nursing mothers and young fathers, that they might have food enough to try to earn a living such as could be had. This I learned from Uncle Takeo whom I mentioned earlier, before we lost contact; our great grandmother’s family had taken them in before Japan had closed her doors to all outsiders, when cousin Ryuunosuke was but a baby (I was about three or four myself at the time)… and confirmed when I finally met Ryuunosuke some fifteen years ago when I had dealings with the fishing fleet he works for. Her sacrifice allowed Uncle Takeo’s family to survive.

Aside from the Japanese, most other Asian nations have done quite poorly, or in the case of those nations which were already quite poor, their situation has hardly changed for the better. Though I suspect that if the Chinese were to pull together again, they might be able to resurrect their polluted land; that, and the Chinese were always a fecund lot, still having today about 900 millions, or about half the remaining population of the world. Too bad that they cannot see eye to eye toward reuniting their land.

Yet, the same might be said for North America, of which I may speak in much more informed detail: here is where two once-great nations now lay divided. I shall now briefly tell you of the outcomes of these two nations.

“Canada” still exists as a rump nation with very, very little central authority, coming out of the very impoverished capital at Ottawa; it has little means to press her authority it in the swath of communities in what used to be the provinces of Alberta to what is functionally still Ontario. As a side note, the Royal Mounted Police are folks you’d rather not have dealings with: they are and have been pretty much judge, jury, and executioner in Ontario. That said, they have very little influence or reach outside of Ontario, though the rare story leaks out about the Mounties lynching some poor idiot who runs afoul of them in the badlands between cities. In the city states outside of Ontario, and especially in the Quebecois parishes, when they are foolish enough to go into the Frogs’ territory, it usually the Mounties who get lynched.

The Mounties claims to power all over old Canada are about as laughable as the old Republic’s attempts to reconquer Colorado or West Texas from the Aztecas, much less quell the African rebellion on their southern borders.

What used to be “British” Columbia broke off from Canada in my teen years, and joined the nominal republic of Cascadia (which consisted of the former states of Washington, most of Oregon and two or three northern California), and any idea of Canadian integrity seems to be further and further from reality as individual city states like Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Moose Jaw flirt with joining the Rocky Mountain Union, another nominal “republic” of most of the towns and cities in the former Montana, parts of Wyoming, parts of Nebraska, parts of the Dakotas, and a small stretch of Minnesota. These confederacies are mostly in name only, and exist to repel encroachments from the still-hungry Aztecas (who arguably fought very bravely for their land, but it is a brutally hot land, and utterly worthless for the type of subsistence agriculture most of us have been reduced to). In the case of the above named “Canadian” cities, they also face encroachment and raids from militant gangs formed from the surviving Metis tribes that since the Downturning have made much ado about the joining their cause with La Raza Azteca. This is of lesser concern, since the Aztecas have more or less accomplished their generational goals of reversing the effects of the ancient Guadalupe Treaty which old Mexico signed with a much younger, much more restive Republic some 240 years ago. That, and the Aztecas really, really hate things like “winter” and “snow”, and mountains… which supposedly are gateways to the hells inhabited by their old tribal gods.

And then there is Colorado, which has some arable land, but now has fallen to squabbling amongst the “repatriated” Native American tribes and the Aztecas, as well as the few hardy farmers holed up in the mountains and high passes where even Azteca braves think twice about venturing into, and some of the northernmost counties which were well within artillery range of the Wyoming Guard and the Nebraska Defense Militia, to say nothing of the harrassing the Aztecas got from the Lakota Nation foraging parties. Arguably, these militias are the axis upon which the so-called Rocky Mountain Union turns; the other towns and cities are far enough removed to elect not to have their own militias, and they make a minimal contribution of men to these units - some by agreement, and others under the unspoken but well understood notion that it would be good to have some men trained in the use of arms should things break down between the member cities of the union.

Now it should be understood by the reader that these territories (notably the RMU, Cascadia, and that unraveling patchwork of a “nation” that calls itself Canada) that enforcement of laws between city states is sparse, and that there is yet much banditry in the badlands between them. Justice, when executed, is very local, and more often than not, is very swift and severe. What used to be enshrined as protection from cruel punishments (and still is, in some city codes and even in the RMU constitution) is a byword in this harsher world. It is safe to say that in our cities for the most part, egregious or gratuitously violent crime is rare. Similar policies seem to be the rule of the day across the Great Missi River in the old Republic, and I hear even the once very humanistic city-states of the New Maritime States and those in Quebec have laid hold of these basic concepts.

There are exceptions, of course. That old haven of vice and perversion, SanFran, and its sister city of Shao-Tien (a Chinese-populated city whose name literally means “Little Heaven”, though you’d might consider it to be a fetid patch of buildings amidst so many other burnt-out buildings - beauty being in the eye of the beholders, I expect) have done well in holding back the Aztecas, who are repulsed by the rampant sodomy of the SanFranites and the able fighting ability of the Chinese.

Although I expect that the sodomites and the Chinese have worked together to hold the Presidio, which commands a nice height from which to drop artillery shells onto anyone desiring to storm the cities, they seldom have much to do with each other, aside from any “recruitment” the sodomites may undertake of any curious young Chinese who want to see the strange men across town.

The Great Quake of 2067 razed much of the ancient architecture, and much of the ruination was transformed into vineyards (SanFran’s other great export beside catamites) and other farmland.

There isn’t much to say about the Southwest - now the territory of the Aztecas, who cleaned out any non-member of “La Raza” with ruthless efficiency. It has been said that in the space of the ten years it took for the old Republic to realize that it was not going to win a battle of attrition without resorting to massive nuclear war on its own continent, at least 54 million people - mostly white “Americans” were butchered in grisly ways, with some help from the Mexican Army, until the Republic finally resorted to nuking Mexico City and Nuevo Leon, taking some 25-30 million of them along for the ride, and using biologic weapons throughout the wider part of the border region - a germ that specifically killed livestock and the corn that fed them to induce famine throughout the region.

So even if the Southwest could be reconquered, it would be rather useless for trying to raise any food or livestock on any large scale - it has been only in the later part of my lifetime that food raids have more or less stopped, or at least slowed to a barely noticeable level; perhaps they are growing more of their own food now. Or they could be squabbling for more Mexican land on their southern “borders”.

The Neo-African South still revels in its utter barbarity, and one wonders how long its many fractious city states will keep from devouring each other. Though that wretched rock in Mecca has long since been reduced to radioactive slag (surprisingly through the agency of the Russians) many citizens in that once proud Southron region still follow that cult of the moon god, and various interpretations of his law are cause for much bloodshed amongst themselves. And the laughably small and impotent “Revived Confederate States of America”, consisting of a large handful of counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a wee sliver of South Carolina that had majority white populations, exercise no small amount of brutality - especially against roving bands of raiders from further south who venture into their highly fortified areas. Florida was quickly separated into its coastal communities of either white or (mostly) Cuban population, most of which is slowly finding its way back to Cuba for the better fortunes that island nation is having. In its more wild state, Florida is actually rather inhospitable, particularly with the coastal flooding that has inundated the once prized beaches, and the inland swamps are hatcheries for all manner of vile plague-bearing insects. Only Pensacola, Miami, Rocket City, and Disni Fortress, along with some naval bases held by the force of the old Republic remain.

As nasty as Florida otherwise is, there are a few noteworthy places. The Disni Fortress is a rather odd place; apparently it used to be a playful place to bring one’s children. Grandpa once told me of his trip he made there with his parents as a child; he disliked the experience rather intensely for the crowds that pressed in on him, but he told me that it was set up on the worship of a giant mouse and his friends. Apparently, people were willing to spend large somes of paper money there, and the surrounding areas were like a paradise. In my father’s day, it was a last redoubt for the defenders of Orlando when the Brotherhood of Nubia and its allies from the Marasalvas (a gang aligned with the Aztecas) had stopped slaughtering one another long enough to try to destroy the naval bases used by Republic Littoral Ships from shelling the life out of their coastal settlements. For some stupid reason, they over extended themselves, and most perished in the swamps and swamp/jungle reclaimed farmlands between Orlando and Disni. Apparently, the defenders still stand guard, looking for anyone foolish enough to take their lands they are trying to reclaim for farming.

Rocket City is notable if only for one very large building, which I am told once housed great missiles capable of going to the Moon and even to Mars, and back. What a futile exercise that must have been, and a horrendous waste of fuel. I do not think very many people live there, and I have no intention on trying to find out with my own eyes. Miami is on the decline, with half of it underwater, and the other half overgrown by vegetation and inhabited by crocodiles. This is one of the few east-coast cities I have seen pictures of, and it is one of the few cities worse off than New York City: it gets flattened a bit more each passing decade by the seasonal hurricanes, without people interested in rebuilding it.

Perhaps we should be aggrieved for the apparent loss of our once-treasured security from such harsh treatment, but I said earlier, these are harsh times for most folk.

Now of the believers, I can only say that many were looking to the return of the Saviour, as they always have throughout the generations. And where some tried setting dates, as always, they were proven wrong. One cannot discern His return merely by judging how truly rotten the world has become, beyond His warning that it would be “as it was in the days of Noe”. Nor could anyone say for certain that technology or the transmission of information is a qualifier; we still have an internet, however sporadic and expensive it may be, and even less reliable as a purveyor of either good news or truth, and there still remains the shell of the old Republic, much smaller and still shattered, though as a tablet of marble thrown to the ground - the pieces still lay very close to each other.

Other pieces were irrevocably thrown apart, as are most of the city-states today are separated by wide swaths of dusty or weed-choked lands once prized as a “breadbasket for the world”, only to be crossed at great peril and expense. Few indeed, save for the extremely wealthy and well armed dare to take their chances on the great roads which are fast reverting back to grassy trails for lack of use.

On a happier note, bison - or the descendants of domestic cattle and bison - are coming back in bigger herds each year. They more or less manage, and with the rising wolf and mountain cats that hunt them, along with the Lakota, I don’t see them getting to a point where they start foraging in human settlements any time soon. The down side to them over domestic cattle is their tough texture; the upside is one need not worry about someone poaching them as you might with your domestic heifers, and they feed themselves.

I have heard that things are a little better east of the Great Missi River, where the old Republic still has some power… most of which was used to seal its southern borders from the Neo-African separatists who made a big slaughter of the minority populations there. Of course, the Republic’s soldiers were no saints either, in cleansing their ethnic African population for fear of them acting as a fifth column. The fires of the revolution were still smoldering when I was born, more than half a lifetime ago; that land is all but impassable now, and the rumours persist of much savagery, cannibalism, and other barbarity which supposedly would make the every day barbarity between (and even among) the Western City-States and of “reclaimed” settlements of La Raza Azteca to be all but but sweetness and light.

Now that is something I can relate to, having myself fought in many of the border skirmishes and knowing firsthand of the Sack of Denver as a youth; say what you like of those Azteca brutes, they are determined fighters, and have almost always fought to win, or died down to the last man. One might say the same of the defenders as well, but very few survived, particularly in the opening battles of the War of Reconquest. There are no prospects, at least that I am aware of, for any of the city states to attempt to liberate the Reconquered lands; the Republic is too tired and weakened after 70 years of international wars, and then another 80 years of domestic ones.

I must now retire for the night. Perhaps on another occasion I will write more, but I have to prepare for a trip to Boy-Z, if I am to get there before the month is finished.

- Ryuuichi Johannson, 8d.5m.2082A.D. (presumed)

Greetings, to whoever finds this record.

Hopefully, it finds its way to some future historian in a less perilous time, or perhaps by someone in the coming Millennial Kingdom before this world and all the matter in it are dissolved by fire, that it might help people of that time understand what this present age has been like. By the old common reckoning, I write this in the seventh day of the fifth month after the winter solstice, near the summer of what I believe to be the 2,082nd year of our Lord - you must know that at this time, I cannot guaranteed this as an accurate date.

Accurate reckoning was somewhat lost about sixty years ago, as international communications and standards fell apart during the Great Downturning, and people have over the years localized and keep their times without much regard for accuracy, even inventing new conventions, much to what I would expect to be our mutual frustration. With that in mind, I hope that any future historian who finds this can adjust for whatever comes to be their standard reckoning of time.

A little about myself: I am known as Ryuuichi Johannson, perhaps a rather odd name for the region I live in. One of my grandparents was Japanese, and her husband was enraptured with all things Japanese, and so began a naming convention that has either been a blessing or an annoyance in our family. To familiars, I go by the anglicized name of “Lou”, which is suitably close enough for this region’s understanding and intonation of English, which has begun to break down very much and differentiate from region to region. For example, New York “Englitch spekeda” is as nearly unintelligible to me as Quebecois French is, and even my grandpa who grew up the better part of his life there before the Downturning had difficulty understanding those few New Yorkers who came to live in our town before he passed on several years ago. Those folks - the D’amato family (name sounds like the vegetable) have handily picked up what must have seemed to them, our bumpkinish brogue.

It is all just as well: my sparing knowledge of Japanese which Grandma taught me is probably out of way out synch with the Japanese spoken today after almost sixty years of isolation. I hope to get lucky again (I haven’t been able to contact my family in Japan for quite a long time) and actually meet someone either else from Japan or some lucky survivor who might have outlived or outran the famines and ethnic wars in California, or if I can make it up to Vancouver sometime again in the near future, which has a relatively flourishing population of Japanese.

Unfortunately, the folks in this region are as xenophobic as my distant Japanese relatives across the ocean ever are, and my blood and my looks are sufficiently diluted enough by my European blood that nobody probes into my ancestry that deeply. Father is less so fortunate, and moved half my lifetime ago to Seatac , the capital in Cascadia, where the locals are slightly more tolerant. A sad episode that was for all of us; Mother lost her life when we fell back from the Burning of Casper some twenty years ago - which was a very nasty retaliatory strike by the Aztecas deep in our territory as a response for our joint forces raid with the Nebraskans and Lakotans to disable the nukes and steal the warheads stored in an old Republic army base near one of the Azteca capitals, Albuqerque. The raid itself went as splendidly as could ever be hoped for; diversionary attacks on their granaries to pull them away from an already thinly guarded post.

I nearly believe that the Aztecas had no clue what the nukes were, what their purpose was for, but they knew that those shiny rockets had some purpose, if only they could figure them out. Over the couple or three dozens of years since they overran Albuquerque, it had never occurred to them to either move the weapons or figure out how the rockets worked (although in reality, none of us could likely figure out how to even launch them - legend has it that they were “programmed” to hit targets in what used to be in China) … and our years of spying were about to pay off.

Our team leader knew enough to vent the fuel in the rockets so that they’d never be launched, and we even recovered a couple of warheads like the militia bosses up in Larry-me and Lincoln wanted. I suppose that they would like to figure out a way to catapult them on top of an Azteca city one day, much as the California Resistance tried to do to Lost Angels after it fell to the Azteca hordes. Father told me that the only thing that happened was that the warhead was detonated incorrectly, spreading radioactive minerals all over much of the city, which means that Lost Angels is a great place to live if you like to count tumors.

We were making our way back to friendlier lines, having just crossed over into Utah or Deseret or whatever it is that the Mormons want to call their homeland these days - when we got the awful news - 25,000 non-combatants burned to death in their sleep, as well as plenty of crops put to the torch.

Father never quite forgave himself for losing her, and the locals became even more afraid of those who don’t look like them; he left town, and I stayed to help rebuild, and build up a trading business between the various settlements in the barely unified “Rocky Mountain Union”.

Though I have been a trader and a traveler - at least through most of the passable regions of North America - and all too often an unwilling warrior in the interests of our survival… I am something of a historian by hobby, when I might have that rare moment of time to indulge it. There is little that remains recoverable presently of the time before the Great Downturning. Most books have either been burnt for fuel (something which I am deeply at odds with, but I suppose that a largely illiterate people, has no need for books that are conveniently available and which stand between them and frostbite or starvation), or are otherwise inaccessible, locked away in repositories whose keys have been lost to time, or worse, whose books have been lost to the depredations of time, humidity, and rot. And digital media, while far more durable, is even more sparse, most of it is inaccessible for lack of machines and the power to run them. The few machines that do exist are either in control of remnants of the old Republic’s military (which is its government, by the way), or a few remaining technicians who know how to operate these machines which were once new to our grandfathers, and have not been much improved since then.

Lest I sound like a complaining soul, one must understand what truly has been lost to this continent, which once ruled much of the affairs of the world, and was considered by its people at one time, and hoped for by its founders some centuries ago, to be the pinnacle of what the man-governed nation-state: a beacon of hope, liberty, and freedom for all her citizens, however imperfectly it was, given mankind’s many shortcomings.

That old Republic, she at last ruled supreme over a decaying time when fossil fuels, overinflated fiat money, and much more refined vices were in abundance, a time where oil-powered wagons roamed the flatways of the earth as do the bison roam them now. Whole cities devoted to sensuality and vice sprung up as leprous blotches on our society, and the love of paper falsely called “money” supplanted the more nobler virtues of self-sacrifice and love for one’s fellow human; the worship of created things supplanted the love of the Creator that made them, and so it would seem that a just and divine, loving God who would not suffer to impose Himself over His people but rather be invited by them to rule as their King slowly but increasingly removed His divine hand of protection from over the nation, allowing her to reap the bitter harvest of her seeds of greed sewn long ago.

Some evidence of these excesses certainly remain; most accept that there were such ridiculously outsized oil-powered vehicles, as some of the more well built carriages remain to this day as rusted hulks on the shoulders of the flatways, or those stacked up at certain checkpoints and tolling points between the city-states, either by the civil authorities or by the bandits exercising their right to tax passers-by through the force of arms. In the cities, especially the coastal cities, great towers still stand (though many have crumbled and become the dwelling place of swarms of feral cats, rats, and birds, and others by bandit gangs, and still others reclaimed as towns in their own right) as testimony to our former greatness. Today, it is a massive undertaking to get twenty or thirty young men to help raise a barn, or a dozen men to raise a farm house or restore an older house. I can scarcely imagine the time and effort needed to erect one of those towers.

And it is very hard for me to conceive of unchecked numbers of these mechanical beasts going to and fro on the old flatways, unimpeded by bandits or militiamen at the toll collection points they set up on whims, usually on the pretense of “collecting funds for the common defense”. I tell you that many of these “militiamen” or “sheriffs” are only a badge’s width from being bandits themselves. The sail-cars and steam wagons and slime-cars of today are far fewer, and far less powerful, at least in terms of how the old stories go, and we certainly lack for the flying craft of decades gone by, though some slime-powered ultra-light craft are used by the militias or bandits for spying out the land.

As I am fairly handy with the such novel and modern conveyances as the sail-bike, horse-and-cart, steam trucks, and sail-cars (quite handy out here where the Chinook winds can put some speed under you) and have even driven a slime-car at the brisk speed that can keep up with a horse at full canter more than once, none of these could get me from Casper to Boy-Z (a stupid name for a town, but that’s how the locals there like it) in less than a week. I can only dream of what Grandpa told me about making the same trip in an oil car in under 10 hours!

Or when he flew in a great flying-craft with a thousand other people to Japan in under a half-day, which if Japan were still allowing foreigners in, it would take a tramper ship four months to six months to make on sail power, praying that the winds and weather were right. Or going from Lost Angels (sorry for that, as I have no idea how to pronounce or write that dreadful moniker the Aztecas gave it in their Nahuatl language) to New York in less time it takes me to get from Casper to Cheyenne in a streamlined slime-car on a good day and a tailwind to boot!

It might have been hard enough for members of my grandfather’s generation, of whom a very scarce few remain on the earth, and more so for my father’s peers to have parted with the fantastic machines and technologies and conveniences of their day, much less to accept living in this wretched and altogether grievous manner, but such is our lot, and the bed prepared for us by our forefathers from long ago is ours to lay in.

How about modern politics? Where once we elected Presidents, Congresses and I suppose in other countries which had their kings and parliaments as the highest ruling bodies, now only remain mayors and in a few rare cases, paramount leaders - often attempting to be petty regional tyrants, little more than brigands and thugs who gained access to much firepower in the earlier days of the Downturning) as the our authorities. If liberty, as some ancient philosopher and one of the reputed founders of the old Republic posited, was the fruit of some “liberty tree” watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots, I dare say that for all the blood spilled in this land, it has failed to nourish the roots of that same tree, or it has altogether dies as the direct result of ill treatment or ignorance of its owners in the much hated “Boomer Generation”.

The last few generations have become in my day something of a fascinating object of discussion: you see, the tale of the generations began with the Boomers’ parents, the so-called “Greatest Generation” that survived an economic depression that may have approached the order of suffering that we have seen, albeit for a short twelve or so years, followed by about four years of international wars over some issue of one European country tearing up the others, and by some manipulations of a President hell bound to get us into the war to spark the faltering economy, essentially picking a fight with Japan which Grandpa told me had something of an alliance with the nasty European country.

This “Greatest Generation” was set to the task of warring and sparking the economy, which as I understand, did just that, setting the stage for the old Republic’s rise from mere “regional power” status to “superpower” status in so short a time. While these “Greats” were not without their faults, they had sacrificed much of their life to the service of their nation. In the decades following that global war, they sired the largest crop of children ever seen in one generation - the so-called “Baby Boom” of the late 1940s - 1950s, according to standard reckoning. We relate to that generation as “Boomers” for another meaning of the word, the great economic Boom that characterized the better part of their duration on the earth - I say the better part, as the trailing edge of that generation saw the beginning of the Downturning; most of the older members of the Boomers had already passed on to either death or senility by then.

And here is where the Boomer’s children - mostly the “Doomers” born in the 1970s through the early 1990s, and the younger “Millennium Kids” that followed them into the 2010s which include my grandpa and father respectively, were filled with deep anger at the excesses and perceived selfishness of the Boomers. I think here in North America, it was especially bad how the Doomer and Millenium generations over-reacted — my father seldom ever talked about those first days of the Downturning, but he did mention those times where the economy was wracked with unimaginably expensive fuel costs, then followed by food and pharmaceutical riots, and then finally the first massive die-offs by famine and disease, topped off by the people freezing to death those first few winters where heating oil could not be had…

… and the sights of people trying to barter their collections of music and moving pictures and pornography and now-useless oil-cars for food that was nearly not to be had must have been a sorry sight indeed.

There is only so much pop-culture and related junk that could be bartered for basic survival, which is something that the average person then simply had no idea about. Everyone was as literate in book learning and technology as they are illiterate today, just as most folks today can get by with sparse fixings, but should they find a book, they’d be as clueless as to do with it than a younger Doomer would have been his first time some sixty years ago trying to start a fire with a hatchet, some kindling, and a sparking stone.

Somehow, there was a massive failure on the part of the Boomers to pass on to their children and later generations those necessary skills for survival - which the Boomers never needed to acquire from their parents for the life handed them on a platter: so in retrospect, whose fault was it anyway?

Given the same circumstances, would our very human and sinful nature encourage that same degree of massive, unvarnished selfishness in our generation?

Perhaps then, the Boomers were unjustly butchered (both physically as well as metaphorically) by the Doomers and the Millenium Kids, and are ill-remembered to this day my generation, who perhaps out of some self-righteous hubris have largely termed ourselves the “Rebuilders”. And perhaps it is hubris that allows us to speak so ill of our elders, as some among the Millenium Kids are speaking more freely about the failings of the leading edge of the Doomers as they pass on into history, that they failed to have spoken to their fathers much more forcefully. For it is now whispered, “When they were young adults, they saw the cliff coming… could they not have taken far more drastic action to prevent the Downturning, or to soften its impact?”

Or what shall we say to our own parents of the “Millenium”, who were so quick to exact vengeance and cut down the last of the Boomers (and very likely, some of the elder Doomers whose ages overlapped the youngest Boomers) in their nearsighted cries of “Death to all over sixty!”

What will our children say of us when our backs are turned? Will they despise us for failing to hasten the revival from the stone age back to the gleaming castles in the sky our forefathers built? What shall our unvarnished title be? Instead of the self-ennoblement of being “Rebuilders”, will we be merely the “Scroungers” or “Foragers” who gave up any hope of restoring the Republic, as we have seen to have barely attained at least some form of cohesive or effective patchwork of regional nation-states?

I cannot say for certain what they will think, or say. I (think) am near to my fifty-fifty year now, born well into the unravellings of the old order, and my sons are old enough to become fathers in their own right, and my daughter shall soon be given to one of her suitors for a nice exchange of gifts to prove his worthiness for my daughter’s hand, just as my boys have scrimped for their gifts to their wives’ fathers.

I can only hope that I have passed on to them values that had to be caught up from the ethers by my parents, for my grandparent (may their souls rest peacefully) were hardly instructed in self-sacrifice by their Boomer parents before them: indeed, I desired (and still do desire) my sons to be thoroughly equipped for the realities of this life.

To them, gave I not hardly a chip of silver for their wedding gifts to their prospective wives, though my dearest Miranda relented and gave them both three ounces of gold from her personal store - a woman’s merciful touch, no doubt. Mercy, tendered with love: for a most stern teacher of the noble woman’s way of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 31, was my dearest Miranda for our daughter, even becoming so bold as to correct me for coddling her where she failed in her chores.

By no means am I perfect, for the old Johannson temperament of boneheaded pride can run deep… but I pray that my sons, who, God willing, shall continue that rebuilding with a realization of revival of some form of republican government which when tempered with by the repentant and humble hearts of its citizens, may yet rise again if the Lord Jesus tarries yet a few more generations. Perhaps, our children will be our first true generation of “Rebuilders” that will have largely forgotten of, or have no ill-memory of the Boomers, being by then four-score or more years removed from them.

I seem to have waxed rather long here, and shall be needing to get more paper from the store. That, and I shall need to literally wax this paper in a paraffin coating, in hopes of preserving this.

If time permits, I shall write more.

- Ryuuichi Johannson, 7d.5m.2082A.D. (presumed)

JOURNAL OF GAIUS DECIMUS FLAVUS, a.d. XII Kal. Sextiles a.u.c. CDXXIV (approx. August 21, 331 BC)

…With the Romans and the various Gallic tribes having concluded a peace, I have been free for the past several months to enjoy the exploration and mapping of Gallia Celtica. Of particular note, my dear Hipparchus, is a rather curious group of cave-dwellers I have been trying to communicate with. The interesting thing with these folks, is that they are not in any obvious way related to the other Gallic tribes, nor do they seem to have much contact with them.

One of the elders has taught me that his name is called “Timeteller” in his own tongue, and in deed is something of a wise man and perhaps a soothsayer among his people. I have given a cognomen of “Cranius”, for the shape of his head is somewhat larger than the typical man, either Roman or barbarian.

These cave-dwellers are for the most part, much more robust than the average person, even larger than the Gauls and the more northerly Teutoni our legions have encountered. Cranius, for example, stands about 7 pedes tall, and is easily half again my own weight, with the tone bulk of a fighting man. Moreover, this Cranius claims to have seen some “seven score and five summers and winters”, and that the eldest of their number have attained nigh unto nine score years. However, I rather find such statements to be self-magnifying and certainly spurious, as even the strongest of men seldom see past four score years. Cranius himself appears to be a healthy three score years of age, at most.

Cranius, like most of his tribe, have a pronounced brow-bone as well, much more so than the typical Gaul… of which he says that once most of mankind once were possessed of this feature, with larger heads - especially the brain-case. He also claims that all men alike once lived for several centuries of years, and that all of us, even Romans, have migrated here over time from Arabia and Parthia and Babylonia after some legendary flood which destroyed the old gods and the Titans, this incredible length of life quickly waned to the spans we know today.

What a fantastic tales he does weave, and I think his people have given him a name that well suits him. As I am a student of the deeds of our illustrious Jove, and his companions who have filled the deep mists of our past with many wonderful legends, I shall endeavor to uncover the myths of these people as I did with the Senones and send my report to Magister Appius Sempronius as always.

I look forward to coming to Massalia next month, perhaps before the Ides of Octobres, and to have a dinner with you and dearest Portia. May the peace of your fathers and Jove guard you as always,

C. Decimus Flavus

SPECIAL NOTE:
If perchance you are not a reader of Harry Turtledove’s works, particularly the so-called “Southern Victory” series (also known unofficially as “Timeline-191″) — this post will have little meaning for you. The series is actually a collection of two trilogies, a tetralogy, and a stand-alone “prequel” that spans from 1861-1945 in an alternate timeline where the Southern Confederacy (hereinafter: CSA) wins the Civil War and a follow-on war to it a generation later… with rather intriguing analogues and twists in the lives of numerous “point of view characters”, some of whom span several generations.

It is an awful lot of reading, and Turtledove’s writing style can get a bit repetitive as well as a touch didactic (he is a history professor, after all)… and as I started at the tail end of the series (and am reading the “back story even now) from which most of this post can be understood - the last tetralogy called “Settling Accounts”.

For the full-blown spoiler-fest at Wikipedia, go here.

SPOILERS ABOUND FROM THIS POINT FORWARD!

I think that balance of power for the post-CSA world will initially be pretty simple:

In North America, The USA pretty much has everything locked down from its border with Russia (at Alaska Oblast) down to whatever state Mexico finds herself in. Texas is a nominally independent Republic, having what may yet turn out to be a Faustian deal with the USA for it not getting completely pummeled by the overwhelmingly angry, powerful, and nuclear (here called “superbombs”) armed US Army.

The CSA is pretty much terminated… (more…)

Soy makes kids Gay.

… or so saith columnist Jim Rutz over at WorldNetDaily.

I wonder if the Trans-Fat veggie-nazis who are making us give up our super-sized McFat Fries and Crazy Cowburgers are going to take up this crusade anytime soon.

“Put down the Kikkoman, and step away from the Tofuburger. NOW.”

Nah, I am not seeing it. If this article has truth to it, it would seem to work to the benefit of folks who want to femenize our male population - and effective reduce it as well. According to Mr. Rutz, babies fed on soy-based formula (up to one fourth of the infant population) can suffer irreversible damage to thier developing endocrine glands, and suffer hormonal imbalances that in girls lead to early onset of menses, and delay puberty in boys.

Supposedly, soy degrades into compounds that inhibit the creation of testosterone, which is crucial to male development.

Among some of Mr. Lutz’s other interesting claims about soy are:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

So, we can now add Soy to the growing list of reasons why some boys love other boys instead of girls:

• supposed genetic factors
• early childhood sexual trauma (molestation)
• pre-pregnancy trauma (stress disorders and chemical abuse)
• exposure to (gay) pornography
• domineering mothers/elder sisters (Freudian theory)
• lack of strong father figure/broken home
• demon possession
• premature sexualization of youth/extreme permissiveness by authority figures
• normalization of previously deviant behaviours (not necessarily limited to sex)
• disenfrachisement of Christianity and God from the public sphere

Of course, I believe that none of these things, with the possible exception of the last, are by any means proofs of cause for people to “become” homosexual, although they certainly do nothing to heteronormalize people.

I think that they may work as factors together which may influence a person’s sexuality though. Sexuality may well be formed entirely before birth, but external or environmental factors are always pressing in and informing our choices and our experiences, which have a cumulative effect on how we choose to express that sexuality.

Some people are born with a disposition to sin in particular ways while not having a disposition to sin in other ways, but sin is still present in this world, and in our flesh. Much sin is built upon recurring patterns of addictive behaviour. For many, sex (of either orientation by both genders) is as much of an addiction as is crack cocaine or alcohol.

I believe that there could be a great many straight people who for various reasons and/or by training/conditioning, have never touched off the triggers that could “awaken” the homosexual desires in them… just as someone with a family history of alcoholism but seldom drinks himself, is not an alcoholic.

My opinion is that regardless of cause, deviant sexuality is but one of the many effects of sin reigning over a ruined world because of the single act of disobedience by our common human father and mother, Adam and Eve… but I see that I am digressing into a topic for another post.

The point of this is - trying to tie the incidence of homosexuality to the consumption of unfermented soy products is about as futile as tying it to any of the items in the above list. Mr. Lutz leaves us without any hard data to substantiate his hypothesis.

UPDATE: This article seems to be chock-a-block full of facts and figures connecting Mr. Lutz’s idea to some science.

Although I am still kind of leery of trying to peg a food to altering a child’s innate sexuality, as I said, it would be but one of may factors.

And besides, the argument we all need to think about is not the right-or-wrongness of being gay or this or that sin. It is about believing on Jesus and being saved, or rejecting His merciful gift.

Infertility, Aisle Three!

Mr. Lutz also credits Soy for being a cause of testicular infertility in males (again, lack of testosterone) and uterine hypertrophy in females, although I am unclear as to how that affects the ability of eggs to implant and grow to term. He equates this with the dramatic rise of fertility clinics in this country as well.

Given the sheer number of Chinese in this world, and contrasted with the declining birth rate of the Japanese, I would have to take a look at the occurence of soy in both diets.

The upshot of this is that most soy in Asian food (of which I eat of quite a bit) is in the sauce, and in things like miso (feremented soy bean paste used in soups and other cooking) and natto (fermented sticky soy beans), all of which, being fermented, have changed the molecular structure of the soy into a form that doesn’t put the damper on “the guys downstairs”.

The other soy (non-fermented “dangerous” stuff) is tofu itself, which in the Japanese diet is not consumed at every meal like rice is, but when served, is usually in portions of about three one-inch cubes of tofu per serving. And there is that green-tea flavoured soy milk, but I can only binge on that once or twice a month when we make our shopping run to the Japanese supermarket in New Jersey.

We generally avoid fast food outlets and anything that overtly sells itself as selling soy substitutes for its meat (if I am paying for a burger, I want semi-charred, ground-up dead ox-flesh on the plate with a trace of pink in the middle!)

Chinese food? Avoid places like “Super Panda” and “Lucky No. 1 Dragon” that have the easily recognized, grease and MSG-slathered numbered entrees like #48. General Tso’s Chicken.

General Tso probably never had to cook, since if he was a real general, he was probably preoccupied with fending off other warlords or bandit tribes to worry much about marketing his chicken recipe. That’s colonel’s work anyway.

Instead, go for a place in your local Chinatown (or a Chinese restaraunt outside of North America) - one that has a mostly Chinese clientele, and actual wait staff, and order up some real Chinese food and see how much of that has unfermented soy products in the cuisine. I have, and I haven’t seen much of it, if any.

As for other soy products, the aforementioned green-tea flavoured soy milk is quite popular, but is not exactly the national Japanese beverage either. Soy burgers may be quite popular though, especially in light of Japanese reticence to consume (especially American) beef as a result of a few Mad Cow scares. I think that the ongoing fertility issue amongst the Japanese is less a matter of actually making babies, but a combination of the karoshi (death from overwork) culture and the ongoing tendency to stall marriage and childbirth with it until much later in life.

And good science does show that fertility rates tend to decrease for older men and women, with a marked decrease for both sexes over age 40. I reckon that biological clock is not “just for the gals” after all.

Let me preface this by saying that there are a great many things that are inimical to the Human Race, and at the same time all too common to us if we persist in our inborn ignorance.

One of them is stupidity (or if you like the KJV, brutishness) according to God’s word (Jeremiah 51:17) :

All mankind is stupid, devoid of knowledge; Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, For his molten images are deceitful, And there is no breath in them (NASB)

What this means in practical terms is that idolatry and stupidity are closely tied together; one is the result of the other.

In similar fashion, neither Persians or Arabs are limited suffering according to the confounding stupidity that is the worship of Allah (who, by the way, was originally the moon god idol of a particular Arab tribe thousands of years ago).

I say again: Islam is not just an Arab or Persian disease. It is a disease of humanity, which has been largely contained in the West by the light of God’s word revealed first to the Jews, and then to all who would believe in the Gentiles’ world (at the time, Asia Minor and Mediterranean Europe, from which it spread around the known world in several generations).

That being said, I came across a post over at the Gateway Pundit which was dicussing the arrest and capture of over a dozen Islamist radicals who were plotting to conduct terror operations in Iraq. Among these individuals were nine Frenchmen, two Belgians, and an American. Yup, more John Walker Lindh in the making.

According to Gateway Pundit and the sources he cited, these young men were there to study Islamic law at Al-Azhar University, but were indeed learning the ways of Jihad, and they sought to recruit others to thier wicked cause.

Indeed, the insanity of Islam knows neither race nor nationality - its all-consuming maw is ready to consume anyone who stumbles into it.

And now for a moment of useless fluff.

Let’s do a side-by-side comparison, shall we…? 

1. Both have anti-semite issues…
2. Both have wide media coverage…
3. Both are moderately, if not excessively fond of thier chosen faiths (Catholicism for Mel, Sunni Islam for Saddam)
4. Both have careers that have ended (or will shortly end) with a rather nasty fall from "public grace".
5. Both could use some serious help in the personal appearances department, especially with the hair care.

Hmm. Do we have a match?

I decided to climb Cole’s Hill, as I used to do every summer day when I was a kid. This hill was not particularly special, other than two very old trees that were at the top.

So far, Cole’s Hill had never been razed for development like the other parcels of land near it. Like Old Farmer Brown’s land for example. Farmer Brown had never hesitated to fill some young whippersnapper’s backside with rock salt for crossing his land… yet I remember that his land had been the first to go under the axe and then the bulldozer.

That cantankerous old man had little say in the matter. A few years of poor crops and competition from the commercial farms out west had put him too deep into debt. To his rue, and my memory, the Olde Farmer’s Vale Markets were erected about 20 years ago, and around it had grown an ugly, small, and uniform village of covenant communities. It had a "A&P" supermarket, an arcade, a bank, and the first movie rental place that I can recall - all done in a horrid faux-Colonial style.

Olde Farmer’s Vale became the first of so many "wealthy man’s ghettos", if you will. Like almost all ghettos, it was a collection of unaesthetic homes, a cramming-in of as many oversized houses onto as many tiny plots of land as was allowed by modern engineering and shoddy building codes enacted by corrupt or ignorant urban planners.

Today, I parked my car over in "Section H", just in case I got lost in the swarm of SUVs that had borne many soccer moms and little-league dads to that icon of Chinese manufacturing prowess and American mercantilism - Walmart.  Supersized shopping carts pushed by straining, sweaty supersized people whose gigantic, greasy, gelatinous buttocks were stretching ever-so-tautly against spandex shorts or nylon jogging pants… like sheep, they were otherwise contentedly feeding and worshipping at the Temple of the Big Box Store.

What a crude thought… here I was, thinking about these morbidly obese men and women, who were a crude imitation of a sausage exploding forth from its casings after fouling in the day’s heat.

A crude thought indeed, at the center of this asphalt sea, imported fresh from the House of Sa’ud for just $79.99 per barrel. Plus tax.

Feeling briefly like one of my pioneer ancestors, I made my way to the outer edge of the parking lot and like a couch-vaulting celebrity, I passed over the protective steel girder. It was the last line between civilization and the frontier… before my climb up Cole’s Hill.

Indeed, now I would find companionship not with SUVs, but with the few sumac trees and scrub brush along the path - Snake Trail.

I used to have to hike about two miles from my old house to get to this spot, down the aptly nick-named Snake Trail.  It was actually called Miller’s Road, and had been a vibrant causeway, itself a throbbing artery of colonial era, mule or ox-drawn commerce between the farm lands of southwestern New York and the Capital at "King’s Towne", long ago.  By the time I moved here as a child, this dusty trail was long forgotten and grown over - reduced to a footpath trod only by curious young boys in search of adventures. And snakes.

That road was now also a dwelling place of skunks, and badgers and field mice; and the Capital  had been moved from Kingston to Albany nearly two centuries ago.

There had been a broken footbridge over Miller’s Creek, next to the stony ruined foundation of what presumably had been a Miller’s House. That house may have been home to some missionary, or miller, or possibly groups of soldiers during either the Revolution or the French & Indian Wars.  There was even a gigantic, round stone - a mill stone - that now was enshrined at the local shopping mecca: The Millbrook Mall. That mill stone now lived on as a backfrop for the derelict men who for a pittance donned seasonally correct commercial holiday costumes to entice parents into buying ever more useless but entertaining junk for thier spoiled, bratty children.

Who knew what stories those rocks would tell if they were given voices… to me and a few friends, they had only been the Fortress of the Martian Space Pirates - forever assaulted by the forces of Buck Rogers and the Earth Defense Directorate. Later, they would be a place to hang out and smoke weed and get drunk with six-packs of Pabst or Genesee, or bring a date for some fooling around.

Miller’s House is no longer there… on that property now sits a pert little split-level house: 1672 Minnow Street, at the "Estates at Fisherman’s Run"… one of four "exciting and bold" designs. Available in your favorite bland pallette of three colors - courtesy of Agincourt Homes, Inc. 

Fisherman’s Run has a rather tacky and oversized sign at the single entrance to the subdivision - it shows a silhouette of a grizzled captain on the forward part of an old triple-masted fishing sloop.  Ironically, the nearest body of water that could support such a big fishing sloop is a good 100 miles away in the ocean.

I did mention the two trees, no?

Ah, the trees. They had always been there for me. One was a mighty oak, that to my childish eyes, had once soared unto the heavens. In its mighty branches dwelled every bird and furry creature and crawling bug. The other was a maple tree - somewhat weaker in comparison, yet also stately. It was just as old… and majestic in its own right. Like an elder couple, they watched the valley below, and had sheltered many from the cold, harsh nor’easter winds that scourged the valley.

Perhaps they had borne witness to Washington’s Continental Army when it had encamped in the valley below, shortly before it disbanded after Cornwallis’ surrender. They were high enough on the hill to avoid being slaughtered for either firewood or timber, and had suffered no ill damage from nature, save for evidence of a lightning strike to the oak.  Yet it had created a lovely bifurcation that became home to various families of birds.

I made my way up the dusty, winding path… how bare it seemed. I looked around expecting to see some of the younger stands of trees, but they had been torn down.

A tinge of sadness mixed with panic hit my heart - small neon flags and wooden stakes with ropes marked off a last area to be razed. My steps quickened… stake upon stake, neon flag upon neon flag… where were the green, wooden arms that had greeted me during my young summer days?

I gazed skyward, but my covering of green was not to be found.

The Elder Couple of trees had at least three offspring that I know of - the eldest was straight and tall, and had saplings of its own. It was not in any way a very different tree, being quite normal and ordinary.

The second had not grown straight at all; it had curved and branch every which way, like a bramble, mixing its branches with every wild thing. It was slowly dying though, of an incurable disease it had gotten years ago… it’s bark was still healthy, but it lived in fear that it would rot and wither away in a few short years. Late in its life, it finally found companionship with a moss that grew on its bark; it helped keep some of the noxious insects and worms away.

The third and last sapling, is somewhere between the first two young trees. Its branches are still growing, and searching for answers, yearning to know the sky as its siblings and parents have. It was green in places and still bends somewhat in the wind, but shows signs of thickening with age about its trunk. In its shorter time, it had imitated both of its elder sapling brothers in thier manners. It had courted many men and women, younger and older, under its branches.

But what of the end of the old path?

What of the two covering trees? No more would the many leaves and branches of the Elder Couple cover me… only tears covered my eyes.

I wept when I saw the trees… the oak had but a few remaining leaves, but much of it had been eaten away. The bark of the oak was mottled and gray. Panicking still, I looked for the maple… it was no more.

Fallen to the ground, rotted from within by some sort of wasting disease, was the withered, dried out trunk of the maple tree. Much of it had been eaten by the disease, branches had been sawn off - what was useable was stacked in log piles and marked for imminent transport offsite.  A bulldozer sat downslope, slumbering in its diesel dreams until its master would wake it early tomorrow morning. Perhaps it would have the task of loading the logs onto whatever transport awaited them.

I turned again toward the aging, nearly barren oak tree… I then wept for the fate that I knew would befall my oak tree.

The Oak! How strong it once was! Long ago, many had tried to lay an axe against it.

But it had stood.

The Oak! How tall it once was! The Fury of the Storm would discipline it with thunder and lightning.

But instead, it grew a fork of mighty branches that once gave a family of robins a home.

The Oak -  How broad it had been!

The pink swatch of spray paint near its roots marked the path of its fate. The deisel giant parked downslope would slumber until Monday morning, which would mark the end of days for that mighty oak.

I looked down at the oxygen tube in Mom’s nose as she finally fell into a slumber. The tank near her bed read at three-quarters full. I adjusted the tube so that she wouldn’t displace it when she eventually rolled over. She had a peaceful look on her face.

After many semi-coherent ramblings about her sister, even referring to her third son as her sister… repeatedly, to my consternation…  don’t forget the petunias either! And she lamented miserably, crying over why Dad no longer visited her.

She would not sleep for long, because the large tumors inside her lungs, liver and her deep parts had grown through her back and around her sides… she could no longer sit or rest for any length of time. But for now, she had a brief respite.

The morphine slowly dripped into the register, and I glanced at my watch. It was time to leave. 

I had to go visit Dad. He was also in hospital, he suffered another stroke again - it was a factor of his continued worrying for Mom, but for some time now he had been unable to care for her at home. He had not been able to see from his right eye, and thus, was unable to safely drive.

Though the two Elder Trees have taken care of me, sheltered and protected me… and given me much counsel over my short life, why do I have such a hard time finding tears? It was not for thier lack of love.

The boy lay on the ground, clutching at the fresh bullet wound in his ankle. Never again would he be able to run; perhaps he would be lucky even to walk with a limp.  The soldiers left him thier after arguing amongst themselves over what they should have done with him, having made sure to take away the AK-47 rifle he had received from his uncle. The boy did not cry, for it is the nature of The Struggle to give and receive wounds, to slay the infidels that were raping the honour of his homeland.

As the soldiers walked away, he began crawling back to the part of town he had come from. Perhaps he would receive assistance from his family, or if not, perhaps he himself would be shot by one of the rival gangs that might see him as a coward for not having fought to the death. 

Captain John F. Randall, a ten year Army veteran, never was one to grumble about his assigned duties. Well, at least not in front of his soldiers. But today, he once again found himself in the thick of action - another round whizzed by his ear and riccochetted somewhere.

"Cranmer, can you possibly find it in your heart to direct some fire on these positions … here and here…"

Randall marked the positions with a stylus on his Command Post Hardened Tablet computer… "at G-6…? We are really hemmed in here by these sniper teams. There are also some mobiles with RPGs in the vicinity, so we cannot risk sending in any vehicles."

"Roger, sir. We are setting up a bracket on those positions"… came the crisp reply over the earbud built into his helmet.

Randall thought to himself, … Now where are those rocket jockeys when you need them … thinking of the Apache teams that were supposed to be providing him with air support. But he had remembered at the Division Commander’s briefing that morning that Air Cavalry was supporting the drive northward toward the Sadr Brigade’s holdouts.

No such luck today, he groaned under his breath.

 
Mustafa Al-Sidari arrived at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he had been working as a records clerk for a little over a year. Fortunately, he had been able to get priviledged parking near the entrance to his work area… each year, the pain in his leg had gotten progressively worse. Every step made him wince, whenever he had to put his weight on the prosthetic device that served as his knee and lower leg and left foot. It was an ill-fitted device, and yet he had considered himself lucky to have gotten it. 

A long time ago, he had been the fastest boy in his town; his uncle would tell him many times that he could have played a sport very well, given the chance. 

Aside from stopping work for a few minutes periodically every day to pray toward Mecca, he was otherwise a model worker, and courteous to everyone he had dealings with. Yet he never allowed himself to become friendly with the other staff. It was just business. In fact, only the keenest eye might have noticed how his countenance was lifted up one morning when going over the patient register.

 

Confusion had reigned for a few minutes as a flurried salvo of artillery rounds impacted around the building; a few partisans had rushed out screaming and somebody had managed to lob an improvised explosive device at the American soldiers. Fortunately, it blew up in mid-trajectory, only hitting a one unlucky man with whatever shrapnel payload it had.

"Fire in the hole! That means stop and drop, you stupid idiot!!" Randall yanked down on the young private’s helmet to illustrate his point. "Don’t think that this is some idiot video game that you can play and expect to respawn when you get hit. This is for keeps! Serjeant Campbell, perhaps some remedial training is in order. For either you, or this sorry excuse of a soldier. You’d best sort out who needs what training, understood?"

"Hooah, sir!" came the reply from Campbell. 

The private nodded sheepishly.

"Gawd, with morons like this, who needs to worry about the enemy… Morris, see if Charlie Squad needs a medevac call… Shumway, Gordon, and Pike: take your fire teams and flank the building that just went poof. Eliminate any resistance you see there."

Al-Sidari spent much of the day double checking the records. If nothing else, he was a very meticulous worker. He had made a note of the patient in Room 404, a certain Army officer that was being treated for one of the many strange new illnesses that were cropping up in the soldiers that had come back from Gulf War II, now in its twelfth year.

He retrieved a keycard he had encoded a few weeks ago.  The pharmacy was supposed to have changed the codes on a weekly basis, but they were too swamped with work to keep up on details like that. So many veterans and soldiers kept the system relatively flooded. Who would pay any attention to an extra order of potent sedatives?

Al-Sidari told his supervisor that he would be taking a longer lunch than usual, and headed off to the hospital pharmacy.

Randall brought the rest of his platoon to secure the remains of the building; the fire teams had killed off the RPG and an assortment of men and boys that had been guarding a cache of weapons and supplies with thier very lives.  Randall lit a cigarette from a pack he had removed from one of the corpses…

"I really need to quit this accursed habit" he said to nobody in particular. As he drew a puff, he felt an explosive kick radiating through his rib cage; the Hardened Tablet computer he was carrying fell free from its mounting on his web belt, and landed with a solid clunk, followed a half second later by Captain Randall.

All he heard for the next several minutes was the commotion of a pop-pop-pop of a lone AK-47, and soldiers screaming for fire at such-and-such direction.

Randall looked up at the shop accross the plaza, where he saw something like a ten-year old boy with a gun running for cover…

He got up and shook off assistance from one of the medics. "For crying out loud, why do ya think we spend $50,000 on each of these vests? Just because they look pretty?"

That got a nervous laugh from some of the men around him… it was only this spring that they had finally gotten the upgraded body armor they had long needed. So many of thier comrades had fallen to enemy fire for lack of any decent body armor.

"Clarke, get a team behind that shop and cover any exits. I saw a young fella with a rifle run inside. Longfoot, Nichols, Swanson… grab yer gear and come with me."

Al-Sidari made his way to Room 404 and checked the name plate on the door.

He had found his man. Retreiving a syringe and the small bottle from the overcoat he had "appropriated" just a few minutes before, he prepared the injection. As he reached for the IV access port, the emaciated man looked up into his eyes… was there a glimmer of recognition?

Randall leveled his M-16 at the boy, and ordered him to drop his weapon; the boy did not respond, other than to level his weapon back at the American.

"Drop your weapon NOW." The boy clicked his trigger repeatedly, but nothing happened. In a blur, the other soldiers fell upon the boy, and beat him mercilessly with thier weapons.  Randall picked up the AK-47 and ordered his men to stop.

He ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber of the AK-47. Eyeing the dozen or so rounds remaining in the clip, he said softly: "I guess we got lucky."

"So, what should we do, Cap? Should we ‘DX’ him and toss him out with the others?"

"There’s no room for any kids at the detention center… and killing him would be a bit too much… I have a boy at home about his age."

"Nichols, secure this AK-47." Randall tossed the weapon to Sergeant Nichols, and put the magazine into an empty ammo pouch on his web belt.

"Gahh, I suppose we will let him go, but first…"

Randall reached for his 9mm pistol, and shot the boy in the ankle. The boy shrieked in pain, but fought to suppress his tears.

"It’s a minor wound, kid. It’s to keep you out of the fight for a while. Do something useful with your life instead of listening to your insane mullahs. Maybe you will amount to something. Inshallah*."

Al-Sidari walked away from the dying man that had been Major John F. Randall, retired. Al-Sidari wore a smile, a genuine smile for the first time in many years. It was only a minor part of his Struggle, but still a victory.

He was no doctor, as Randall might have thought. Looking back at the dying officer, he merely said: "I guess you got lucky, Major Randall. I am sorry that you could not have led a better life, but you’ll feel better in a while… Inshallah." 

*Inshallah = "if God (Allah) is willing".