Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  “And concerning that, what will the Coalition do if we violate the Rights and Responsibilities?” This was from Hong Kong.

  “I cannot speak for the Coalition, but my recommendation to them will be that the Coalition disassociate itself from a violating member community.”

  The speaker from Hong Kong was now pointedly playing the questioner to me. I found it a rather interesting position to be in. The questioner is questioned. I never thought of doing that to my mom. “What would the Coalition do if one of the communities tried to force another community to do something they didn’t want to do?”

  “Again, I don’t speak for the Coalition, but if a Coalition member community tried to force another community to do something against their will, I would view that as a violation of the Rights and Responsibilities, specifically, the one that says all member communities are to make their own rules as long as they adhere to the Rights and Responsibilities. I would ask that they be dropped from membership. I would also ask that the Coalition assist the member community that has had its sovereignty violated. I can’t guarantee that the Coalition would follow my suggestions but I would make that recommendation.”

  Silence. Prolonged silence. Then spontaneously, there were nodding heads and smiling faces, even from the representatives from Shenzhen. “I think you have given us much to discuss, Mr. Caldwell. If California can live with guns, perhaps we can live with freedom to speak the languages of our choice.” I’m not sure that was a great comparison, but if it worked for them, I was happy.

  Once the Speaker from Shenzhen endorsed a compromise solution to the language problem, the group started hammering out how to cooperate on the development of a college and university, as well as a medical school. We worked on the details for the rest of the day and the next two, and then I felt I could leave them to their own planning. I wanted to be in the vicinity as they worked without me in case I needed to return to help them get over a rough patch. As it was, I wasn’t needed.

  Over all, we were in the area for five days, three of which I spent working with different planning committees that I helped them set up. My hosts were remarkably kind to each other and it was hard to imagine there had ever been conflict between them. Watching them, I realized just how much talent had survived. Guangdong was a region that had quite a few more people than California before The Sickness, so it had more survivors. As far as anyone had been able to tell, there were only a very few ethnic groups that fared better than any of the others when it came to surviving The Sickness so Chinese post Sickness numbers were right along with everyone else’s. Guangzhou and Shenzhen were both larger than SLO with Guangzhou being just a little larger than Shenzhen. Even with their larger numbers Guangzhou was able to house all its residents on an island in the Pearl River that had held a university before The Sickness.

  Over all, there were about twenty-five communities in the area. The Zhuang community had formed a bit more recently than most of the others. It was to the southwest of the city of Guangzhou, but close enough that the trip could be made easily in less than a day. Their village was only a little over 500 residents, most of whom had come from either Guangzhou or Shenzhen. Almost all of them had originally come to Guangdong and Shenzhen to find work. Several were quite well educated and, after discovering each other in the days following The Sickness, they voluntarily segregated themselves in their own village. They wanted a place to call their own where they could maintain their Zhuang customs and way of life. Unfortunately, the original homeland of the Zhuang had never gotten organized and could be a bit like the old wild west. I suspected, however, that the Zhuang village would begin to play a key role in pulling it together over the coming months and years. As word spread of its existence, the Zhuang community was growing a bit every week, many from people who had made their way to it from the Zhuang homeland.

  While there was religious freedom in all the Coalition member communities, two stood out, at least to me, because they were overwhelmingly Christian in a fairly non Christian part of the world. One was Mandarin speaking and was fairly close to the Shenzhen community, and the other was Cantonese speaking. It was located near Guangzhou. I had a brief conversation with both of them after the first day. They wanted to know if they could include religious teaching in their schools. I told them that I recommended they not include a specific religion for instruction at school, but that after school religious instruction that was not part of the school program would be fine as long as it was voluntarily sanctioned by the guardians and as long as older children be given the opportunity to opt out. Official government sponsored religious beliefs and education are not compatible with religious freedom. I shared with them that it was my personal belief that religion declines in places where the government and religion are official partners. I pointed out to them that Christianity had been growing at a very healthy pace in China with no governmental support, and that in Europe where churches were often sponsored by their governments in the past, the churches were being abandoned. I suggested they study the issue before they decided to make a partnership between the government and their churches. In the end, they asked me if I were a Christian. I told them I hoped they would be able to answer that question for themselves by observing my actions.

  For two glorious days, Kevin, the kids, and I were given a guided tour of Guangdong province and Macao and Hong Kong. What a beautiful place south China is. Unfortunately, over the next few years and decades, almost all of these gigantic buildings will begin to fall to ruin and become dangerous relics of a bygone era. I will never get used to seeing empty cities. Looking at Hong Kong from the harbor at night, only a couple of areas were lit up. Most of the shoreline was dark. All the skyscrapers were abandoned. The shore was quiet, and only a few small boats were visible. What I thought would look romantic and exciting was, instead, depressingly dark and defeated. What a tragic waste, and it was caused by people. I was glad we would be home soon.

  August 14

  I’ve been home and at work now for a few days, and the kids are back in school, Dinah has forgiven us, I think, but I know she was in good hands with Irma and Carl. Lydia covered for me while I was gone. Nothing happened that I needed to worry about except that a rather worrisome fire has started in the hills above Malibu. Before The Sickness, periodically we’d get fires all around Los Angeles during fire season. With so few people to fight the spread of fires I’m afraid that our very first post-sickness fire season is going to be a doozey. Thank heavens we caught the fire starter during the rainy season but fires start for all sorts of reasons, and we have a lot of abandoned buildings and vehicles all over the place. The sun reflecting off a car or house window can start a fire. We might even accidentally set them off ourselves. Whatever it is, it could be a big one. Besides, it’s a California problem and they’ll handle it since, technically, I don’t deal with local or regional problems unless specifically asked. So, if Californians ask for outside help, I’ll bring it up with the Coalition members. There’s another fire up in Alberta, just above the Montana border. If the regional communities there ask for help, we’ll see what we can do. I’m afraid that we just don’t have the population to make much of a difference. The biggest cause of fires used to be lightning and humans. Lightning still happens and we still have humans, just not so many. We’ve already begun addressing the fire hazard, at least here in California, by including firefighting training in our militia workouts.

  The rash of suicides we had at the beginning of summer has begun to die down. We’ve been trying to find ways to deal with the loneliness and isolation some of us are experiencing. Todd and Cynthia joined a high school bowling league last week. Kevin and I joined a community chorus. Jane is one of the pianists. So far we’ve started a whole group of bowling leagues, several tennis clubs, a golf tour, running, biking, swimming, hiking and camping clubs, a dozen or more card groups and clubs, dance classes and clubs, square dancing clubs, a couple of choral groups besides ours, three community theatre groups, and lots of oth
er interest groups are in the offing. And that’s just in SLO. Another example, Avery is starting an art appreciation class that will meet weekly and culminate in a tour of art museums across the country. He says there will be several of those starting all over the world with the end product being a large number of art preservationists in the making. We hope to achieve two goals from all of the clubs: first, we want to enhance people’s lives and connections; and second, we want to identify isolates and backgrounders. If we can identify who is disconnecting, perhaps we can gently reconnect to them and let them know someone is interested in them. Who knows? It might work.

  The biggest news is that Panhandle has petitioned to join the Coalition. They peaked at just under 600 residents there, many of them arriving as a backlash to my becoming the Executive Director of the Coalition. Fortunately, that was short-lived, and most people got over it, even in Panhandle. I don’t know how Panhandle feels about me now, but Roger Sayers, who has his own set of biases, seems to be, at least personally, only somewhat negative toward me. He still makes off putting comments about Kevin and me, but now they are mostly in private. Nevertheless, as prelude to being inducted into the Coalition, Panhandle has agreed to remove the offensive rules that affect people who don’t look, act, or worship the way they want. They’ve apparently decided that the wrong people, ethnically, aren’t likely to move to the Panhandle, anyway, given how many other places they can move to, and his little corner of the world will continue to be just as white as it is now. What drove him into the arms of the Coalition is his need for medical and engineering training for his people. He managed to find a couple of likeminded teachers to open an elementary school for the few children who survived along with a parent who chose to live in that environment. Now, it seems that when the baby boom we are starting to have across the Coalition took hold in the Panhandle, Sayers’ group began to experience a fair amount of outmigration. Most of the future moms and, presumably, the future dads didn’t want to stay in an area with such a sketchy future. The Coalition trades with non Coalition communities and we offer medical support, we just won’t educate them, at least not at the moment. So, they’ve applied for membership which is being discussed among the Coalition leaders. I have to sit in, but I seldom address these types of issues.

  Panhandle is a classic example of the concept of de jure versus de facto segregation. In preparation for seeking admission to the Coalition, Panhandle no longer broadcasts their anti gay screeds and their whitewashed propaganda. Of course, it’s unlikely that any person of color will ever consider living in the midst of such hatred and scorn. For that matter, neither will Muslims, Jews, gays, atheists, or anyone who isn’t their version of white and Christian. With their bland lack of diversity, Panhandle must be a bit boring. We’ll probably let them join, but deep in my heart I wish it were otherwise. I don’t know if this will stem their flow of out-migrants. Worse for them is that if they’re not neo fascist anymore, what have they got to entice the rest of their people to stay?

  The only way this affects me is that George Francis will be their temporary representative to the community here in SLO, so that means he’ll be residing in SLO again. It doesn’t appear to bother him that everyone here thinks he tried to kill me. He knows we can’t prove anything and, therefore, we won’t arrest him or declare him persona non grata. I guess I’ll have to get used to having a guard.

  On a completely different note, Kevin and I have chorus practice tonight. The kids will be at home with Todd and Cynthia. Kyle and Julie will be there, too, since Jane will be playing the piano for the chorus. I think Todd has some sort of computer workshop going on. That means Eric Bowersock will probably be there as well. There will be several other teenagers over so it will be quite the gang. They’ll stay in the basement and eat pizza’s from the newly opened pizza parlor that’s one of our first businesses to open since The Sickness. Before The Sickness, the thought of having a dozen or more teenagers congregating in my basement would have been unthinkable. But teenagers, at least Todd’s friends, are very different after what they’ve gone through. Of course, Dinah will be over at Irma and Carl’s. She’ll probably spend the night.

  August 21

  The fire in Malibu has burned itself. We’ve decided to just let most fires burn since there’s nothing we can really do about them anyway. We just don’t have the people to stop them. There’s also no real reason to save all the buildings that are threatened anyway. It will be many generations before we have any need for them again. The ones with things we will need were salvaged or dismantled early on. We’d already dismantled and stored a number of windmills that we don’t yet need for power generation just on the off chance we may need them eventually. In this particular Malibu fire, there was no wind to fuel the fire, so the road network that already existed in the area stopped it.

  Still, it’s a reminder that we are more vulnerable to all sorts of natural disasters than we were before. The weather satellites are still working so at least we can plan ahead. With a little warning we can get out of the way of a big storm or hurricane. Our population is so small that we shouldn’t have a huge loss of life, even relatively speaking, but with so few people remaining, any loss of life can harm our overall recovery. We have a few specialties that literally have only one survivor. All of the single survivor occupations that I can think of have apprentices so we’re working to save their knowledge and skill sets, but an accident could really set us back right now.

  For the next few generations, it’s probably just a matter of maintaining civilization and learning to live with the new circumstances. For us in California, the worst things that are likely to occur are the same things that threatened us before The Sickness: Earthquakes, drought, fires, and mudslides with the occasional flashfloods and tsunami thrown in. Every region has its problems, and repair and rebuilding will continue to be a problem so we plan to just move out of the way, and when it’s over, we’ll relocate that community if necessary.

  In the beginning, we talked seriously of trying to establish ourselves in one single area here in North America, but decided that would make us far more vulnerable to some single catastrophic event. It might also lead to isolation and tribalism, so we decided to keep as many communities going as we could, and that meant we had to maintain our transportation network, or certain key elements of it.

  Some areas really didn’t have much choice about consolidating. Australia was so scattered that they asked their people to come together in fewer than a dozen locations. They keep an outpost on Tasmania, and one up in Darwin. Other than that, they mostly consolidated around their major cities with none larger than 1,500. There were a few survivors on some of the South Pacific Islands. Most of these people migrated to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Guam or Tahiti. Still, every so often, we get a request for help from a very small holdout group who has decided to relocate after initially deciding to stay.

  A community with 1,500 residents is a large town now. Here in SLO we are able to maintain all the amenities of a small city from the past. One of the reasons is that we have a lot more leisure time than before. People can take classes, start a hobby, sing, dance, act, work out, or whatever strikes their fancy. What they don’t do is watch television very much. We could have all the channels we had before, but, judging others by myself, people don’t want to see a bunch of familiar faces of people that are gone now. Now and then a media personality survived, but actors didn’t fare any better than the rest of us. Money, looks, talent, nothing made any difference when it came to who survived and who didn’t.

  It appears that the most popular activity is what Carl calls sexual therapy, at least for the adults. And evidently spontaneous sex therapy without precautions is the preferred form of therapy. It may be that people just want to have families again, as Dr. Mary suggested. One guestimate I’ve heard is that around 15% of the women between the ages of 20 and 45 are pregnant or will be by yearend. Dr. Mary said she’s never seen anything like it. According to her, many of these
pregnancies are planned, or at least semi-planned. For every Irma and Carl who actually were caught by surprise, there are two or three couples that hoped for a child. Due to the work of our high school, we have no teen pregnancies. At least, I don’t know of a single teen pregnancy here in SLO. The Gap Year is a big reward for finishing high school and not getting pregnant. We hadn’t planned it that way, but that’s how they view it. Marco tells me there’s plenty of sex going on down at Pendleton, too, but it’s all safe, or at least protected.

  Also, at least in SLO, no one has asked for an abortion. I don’t know how we’d respond if someone did. The hard reality is we need the babies. I’m not going to mince words about that. This is a good thing, as long as we can provide for all these children and still keep our city functioning. Also, from what I’m hearing, most every mother plans to enroll her new baby in our nursery school. We call it the Creche, and it’s largely modeled after something the French were doing before The Sickness. There is also a treasure trove of research from Emory University in Atlanta. Actually, most of what we are doing is modeled after something someone was doing before The Sickness. When our teachers got together with each other here in SLO, and, then, with teachers from across the Coalition, things just sort of happened in a big way and in no time, we had a program that takes care of children practically from birth until they graduate from high school. I’ve noticed that Chanelle, Jerry, and Charlie have advanced educationally much further than I thought they would given all the turmoil they were living through. It’s impossible to compare their schooling now with what they had before. They went to good schools at the time, but they were only there from about 7:30 AM until about 2:30 in the afternoon. They were also in classes of close to 30 kids. Now, there are teachers and something entirely new, at least in my experience: a group called docents who provide in depth training on an as needed basis, particularly for kids who need advanced instruction. On top of that, there are aides and volunteers.