by Matthew Tyler Funk

Created on: January 27, 2008

Here we are, in the climactic days for life on the planet Earth. Industrial civilization has destroyed so much that many of us living now face the real possibility that our would-be lifetimes might be cut short due to a man-made planetary extinction.

What would people from other times say about what is happening now and what would they be doing about it? Can you imagine we face the possibility of killing the planet within our lifetimes!

I have this recurring nightmare where there's this sparse circle of kids sitting by a lake of plastic particles, pesticides and sewage - or a molten river of depleted uranium - 25 years from now, listening to me tell the story of how 6 billion people were co-opted into killing virtually everything on the once lush and living planet around them (or standing by as it was all killed) all in vein attempts to reach some unreachable goal laid down by their invisible masters, like "progress," or "growth," or "security."

The sparse circle of kids disappears as my dream's focus narrows and I have this intimate conversation with one kid in particular. I answer his many questions about the story and about my own life back then, and I can see in his eyes how he lusts for a time machine so strongly that even I can feel it, and I hear in his voice the sharp, resentment for me and my generation for what he considers to be a very personal betrayal of himself and his generation, his childrens' generation and all the generations that follow, if there even are any. I see this resentment of me on his face as well, only there it looks more like hate.

In a time when heroes and martyrs were needed most, my generation let the world burn at the hands of those who claimed they had the right to do such things. I can see the desire to return to this time in a time machine and go down fighting for life and good and glory, rather than live on in an endless misery of hell on Earth. I can see it and I can feel it a fantasy ten thousand times stronger than my own fantasies as a boy when I would watch a war movie where the hero goes down fighting at the end. What I feel in the dream is far stronger than mere fantasy.

What I feel through that boy is a deep determination and a seething, churning knot of relentless internal misery and sadness and desire and yearning to fix things that can no longer be fixed, without regard for the death or temporary torture that might replace a fate in a future hell-on-Earth dystopia. I feel his rage and determination so deeply that

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