Utopic Vision

In the world I imagine, we are doing impossible things every second. Not like cloning a super race from a WWF wrestler's spit, or genetically modifying a human being to be able to breathe in space - worthwhile things, 'primitive' things, things lost centuries ago but reclaimed by us in recent years.

We are creating clothes from used Styrofoam and rubber from car tires. We are running full speed through knee-length grass toward home, our home, leather walls pulsing with the drumbeats of the music we've invented, strange tribal rhythms mixed with the lyrics of old songs from the 20s - and it may be cliche, but I imagine the meltdown of the corporate world, stemming from the vast crackdown on corrupt executive policies, the end of politics and foreign policy due to global war, in-fighting, and terrorist driven diseases which eradicate the half or more of the population stupid enough to touch doorknobs without gloves on (there were times when we didn't see our hands for months, after biological warfare became as easy as a guy in a basement with a bathtub and some soap), and I imagine wading with hats made of trashcan lids through rice paddies on abandoned concrete streets, watching children in the hills standing on each other's backs to pick pears from trees that belong to no-one, everyone, doesn't really matter, because this is the future and we've advanced beyond gree.

We never eat another cheeseburger. We drink fresh milk from the cow in our backyard, we grow roses that climb the tent poles and we make huge pots of rosehip tea, we make teapots oiut of clay from the river and bits of shattered mirror, we learn "how to effectively skin a rabbit while remaining sensitive to its feelings," ("Chicken Soup for the Daughter's Soul", Fatima Policarpo, 2002) we eat rice and tofu and banannas and soy and potato-leek soup on special occaisions, we grow tomatoes and chili peppers in the garden and create new breeds of plant daily. We paint enormous flags, with poetry on them, to swirl in the wind like milk bitterly becoming a part of coffee.

We speak a hundred archaic languages, from Latin to latter-day Japanese. We preserve the history of the human race in our sweat, in our hair, in our teeth and fingernails, every fiber of us telling of the struggle up from the ooze, the rise and fall of modern medicine, we are the freakish product of artificial modifications and genetic mutation. We are the end of a millennium of change. We create that which we have always dreamed of creating; we become that which we have always yearned to be.

No longer does the government act as a parent, instilling propaganda in the minds of children, weaning them slowly off of wholesome television (if such a thing exists), sowing violence, hatred, and vengeance into their breakfast cereal, condemning the childish vices of a couch potato generation, while secretly funding their manufacturers. Children were raised on a regimine of

1. Video games: to develop hand-eye coordination, to teach them to enjoy killing, even crave it,
2. Porn: to implant a "healthy" sexual appetite and perpetuate the image of women as a sexual object to fulfill man's desires (in order to reassert a patriarchal, male-dominated society),
3. Sexual education (STD and safe-sex awareness): to control the population by undermining marriage and pushing contraceptives, and to develop a "healthy" widespread case of paranoia,
4. Educational, literary, and cinematic attempts to eradicate prejudices towards same-sex couples, in fact encouraging same-sex partnerships in order to effect yet another population decrease, condemning the family unit and claiming all children as wards of the state.

This was the death of innocence; this was the birth of an army of tiny soldiers, destined to be wiped out by a guerilla movement of grieving mothers, ageing porn stars, and the previous video game-obsessed generation, filled with deep-seated feelings of betrayal and rage at the government's influence over their children - not to mention themselves.

In the world I imagine, a woman is free-climbing the remains of the Sears Tower in a self-inflicted endurance trial. She is screaming in agony and joy, clutching for tiny crevices between the opaque, cracking windows and digging her toes into the ragged concrete, straining, sweating, fighting to stay conscious as her muscles burn with inhuman effort, fire for blood, fire for sweat, the silhouette of a woman against a chemical sunset, she grits her teeth and climbs, better than sex, better than God, (maybe she experiences both at the same time) reaching the top as firecrackers explode behind her eyes, she yells in triumph. I imagine her dangling her legs over the side, into the air cleaned by the dismatling of car companies for the conservation of resources, into the warm Santa Ana wind. I imagine her laughing. I see her stare out at the world she's creating in her head.