Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  If I thought my use of the word ‘husband’ to describe Kevin was perplexing, this concept was confounding. They sat silently so I decided to fill the silence with more unasked for information.

  “When everyone died, we were left in the closest thing man has experienced to the Garden of Eden since God drove Adam and Eve from Eden in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible. We have everything we can possible want except for our dear departed loved ones from before The Sickness. All our possessions were as nothing compared to the loss of our families and friends that we experienced on that day just over one year ago. And now, we have all collectively inherited the world: a world that started with very little hope, with a bleak future, no goals, no purpose, and worst of all, without those loved ones who supported us, who believed in us, and who helped bring meaning and purpose to our lives. Every one of us was given a clean sheet of paper on which to write our destinies, or we could decide to do nothing and merely exist. Many of us did exactly that. There are thousands of survivors who never connected with anyone again. They didn’t organize communities or even try to connect with other individuals. On top of that, in almost every community in the world, people chose to end their lives rather than start again.

  We are all here because we answered the call to live. The world now is almost like a new Garden of Eden. But this time we know the difference between good and evil. There isn’t a single rule anyone can make that can be enforced, at least not without the use of chains. If an individual doesn’t want to comply, they don’t have to. Frankly, rules that require chains to enforce are an abomination. You can create your new garden of good will and faith here in Filadefia, but it will be based on people freely and individually choosing to live here in that garden with you. It’s a garden bought and paid for by the loss of all those we held dear. It isn’t the Garden of Eden that was irretrievably lost to us, but we can make it the Garden of Free Will.

  That’s the whole point of the Rights and Responsibilities. Everything is voluntary. If people want to live in Filadelfia with you, they will live here because they want to. If they want to leave, they will, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

  Filadelfia doesn’t have to join the Coalition or have a community military or militia. It’s all completely voluntary. However, if you join the Coalition, all your 16 year olds will be invited and encouraged to take a Gap Year and see what the world has become. If they come back to you, it will be their choice. By the way, whether you join the Coalition or not, your young people will be welcome to participate in the Gap Year in California. All they have to do is get themselves to a Coalition Community, and we’ll be happy to have them.”

  I paused and the room was still silent. After a moment, the presumed speaker rose to speak. He seemed conflicted. “I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t know how to respond and would like some time to reflect. Would you mind if we took a break for about half an hour?”

  But before I could answer, one of the older men in the Filadelfia cluster interrupted. “I need to say, I think you lost me when you referred to that young man you’re with as your husband.” There was an audible groan from the entire group.

  I barely stopped myself from smiling. “That’s a good example of an unenforceable rule. There is nothing anyone, anywhere, can do to make me not a homosexual. I’m gay. And I love Kevin. That’s all I can say about that. If that is a stumbling block to your becoming a member community in the Coalition, so be it. I offered my resignation once over that issue, and it wasn’t accepted. I won’t resign over my being gay again.” I paused just a beat and continued to the rest of the group, “Take all the time you need. I’ll be in the kitchen area with anyone who would like to join me. I hope you don’t mind if we sample some of your local cheese and sausages.” As I left for the church kitchen and the food, I was joined by about a dozen or more non-Mennonites from the other communities. They were as silent as the people from Filadelfia. I’ve come to understand that all of us, no matter what our post-sickness responsibilities are, are just regular men and women who never wanted or expected to be involved in politics or government. The people gathered with me in the kitchen at that moment had just had an experience of how complicated getting along with each other can be. We are in the process of relearning everything about government and diplomacy, not because we forgot, but because we relied on someone else to do it for us, and we never knew much about it in the first place. In my high school, government classes were a joke for us and we barely paid attention. During our break, I resolved to make sure that studies about government were going to be a more important part of our school curriculum in the future.

  After about 45 minutes, we were asked to rejoin the group in the meeting hall. I couldn’t tell what they were going to do by their faces. No one looked happy or sad, just very serious.

  “You’ve pretty much answered all the questions that mattered to us. We will want to know more about the rules about property and work and so on, but that can wait. We’ve decided to join the Coalition, or maybe I should say, we’ve decided to ask to join the Coalition.”

  From then on, the arrangements were pretty cut and dried. I told them they would have to be accepted by the Coalition Council and that I was optimistic, but I was unable to give them an answer as to whether the Council would approve their membership or not. When they asked about the orphaned children, again, I couldn’t answer. Personally, I didn’t see a problem, but I’ve learned to never speak until I have all the facts. At least, I haven’t done that in the last couple of hours.

  Gerte was beaming, and very slowly the group was coming around to accepting their own decision. We talked about how Coalition Communities governed themselves, and I filled them in on the different variations. Because of the monthly reports, I probably know as much about how the world runs lately as anyone. April and Elaine both know just about what I know since they’re my assistants, but I also have lots of telephone conversation with the different Speakers and Representatives, so I probably have an edge on them. I’ve also started to live, breathe, and sleep Coalition business, and that has to mean something.

  Over the next couple of hours, I kept reassuring them that the Coalition did not involve itself in the life and customs of the local communities. Generally speaking, Coalition Communities have a leadership team and a Speaker. Most of them cooperate regionally with other nearby communities. The larger communities help the smaller ones because we need each other. SLO cooperates most with our closest neighbors, Morro Bay and Monterrey, but also with the other California communities as well as the West Coast communities. Beyond that, we work with the North American regional communities of Mexico, Canada, the US, as well as those in Central America and the Carribean. Next, we participate with the rest of the world. There aren’t many of us, and travel is quite easy, at least for individuals and small groups. The Air Force is always happy to have an excuse, any excuse, to schedule a flight between Coalition Communities.

  Most communities have their own schools through elementary levels, at least. The curriculum is secular, but time is carved out for religious instruction during the afternoon. Episcopalians are pretty mellow so Kevin’s and my kids get all their religious instruction on Sunday morning. All of them except for Jerry, that is. Now that Jerry is 12, he attends Thursday afternoon confirmation classes with our pastor at the school. Channel does, too, but since she’s not technically my adopted child, I don’t include her when I tell people that Kevin and I have four children. There are several religious classes taught by the different clergy going on simultaneously. Most kids don’t take any classes as religion in general didn’t really have a resurgence after everyone died, especially the really strict rules oriented religions. The more cerebral religions seem to have been growing a bit. Ours kids take classes and they will continue to because that’s the way Episcopalians do it in preparation for becoming adult members of the church.

  The religious classes are voluntary and aren’t part of the school program. Th
ey wouldn’t be taught at the school site at all if it weren’t for the fact that school goes on for so long. Some children, like ours for example, spend a lot of their time at the school. Kevin arrives around 2 PM or so and volunteers in some of the programs that our kids participate in after their class work is over. In the beginning this was a necessity because the guardians couldn’t juggle taking care of kids and working in the community. Now, we’ve refined it so that most kids prefer having a place to learn and play rather than going home to be what we used to refer to as ‘latch key’ kids. Lots of guardians, most in fact, come to the school as volunteers either before or after their work or college classes or occupational training courses. Judging from my kids experiences, I’d say that most of the kids at the school now know most of the adults in SLO simply because the school has become the central core of our community.

  We don’t have many laws in SLO. I think of our type of governing structure as a sort of a humane libertarian approach to government. Without money, everything is free, but we don’t want to be wasteful. By the end of this coming summer, there will be a huge surplus of food being grown. We’re okay with that, at least for the time being. For now, we expect people to work at least a few hours a day. Many, and maybe most, work a full day, especially the farmers, the medics, the salvagers, the engineers, the educators, and everyone involved in training or retraining. Travel and transportation are free, subject to availability, and almost every community has developed a tourist industry. That seems to be the primary way of rewarding hard work. Morro Bay, for example exists because we have a naval station and a fishery there. But if you didn’t know about those things, you might think it was because it was a tourist center. With their gigantic rock at the opening to their harbor, and their amazing sandbar, Morro Bay looks like it was built for fun.

  Everything is free in SLO. Food, gas, electricity, phones, TV, health care, school. Everything. And everyone works. Most jobs are arranged through a guild system. If you want to work in electricity, you make an appointment with the leaders of the electricity guild. If they need workers, and almost all the guilds do, they look at your skills and qualifications. Then they make recommendations. Once you and the leaders agree, you either go to work or you go to school to get ready to work. It’s pretty much a voluntary thing, but someone can’t go out and string electric wires unless or until they’ve been trained, voluntary or not.

  Kevin or I usually stop and get the ingredients for dinner at the food court. We can call ahead and get something special, but usually we just take whatever is being parceled out. The food court people usually offer three or four dinner selections for take home meal prep, and we often get more than one meal at a time so this isn’t an everyday errand.

  The kids’ medical needs are taken care of at school. Because they are all orphans, they get everything the doctors recommend vaccination wise. If I were both the legal and biological parent to my children, I would be more in control; however, realistically, I wouldn’t change a thing. So far everything’s working, at least in SLO. The reports indicate that now and then, and here and there, people have to be spoken to about wantonly wasting resources. Or, sometimes people have to be advised to go to work if they want to remain a resident of a specific community.

  We know there are people who are living off the land, as it were. At this point, we’re all pretty mellow about that sort of thing, but there may come a time when we have to confront them. One thing we absolutely will not allow, though, is loners or gangs attacking our workers, particularly the salvage crews. Individuals can lay claim to an abandoned farm, small groups can claim a small town or a group of abandoned farms, but no one is allowed to molest or impede our salvage teams, our farmers, our explorers, or our various caravans, scheduled or unscheduled. Some regions have more outliers than others. Fortunately for SLO, we have almost no identified loners, although we do have a few isolated, but cooperating farms.

  One of the isolated farms tried to trade us marijuana for some food items. Since we already have marijuana dispensaries, that was a waste of their time. It turns out we had quite a few very experienced marijuana growers in our midst already. This little group gave up on their marijuana trading idea and went into the herbal tea and designer cheese business. They’ve now become a fully-fledged cluster of cooperating farms attached to the Monterrey community, the closest community to their rather isolated farms. Once the founding couple became a recognized part of the community, they had a little population boom, and there are now at least five couples. I’m not sure ‘couples’ does their arrangement justice since more than one of them seems to be larger than two people and all of them might also be described as a bit fluid in membership. It seems to work and they seem happy. Several women in the little farm network are pregnant so I’ve heard.

  As for pregnancies, they’re still going strong, but Lydia was right about the new moms and dads. As soon as the new parents have taken a few weeks off to bond with their new family members, they’re going back to work, either in their old vocations, or at the crèche. Most seem to be spending the first few weeks at the crèche helping their newborns settle in and making sure they feel good about the program themselves.

  It’s very unlikely that anything we are doing now would or could have been done before The Sickness. We started doing it out of the urgency of the moment. So far, we haven’t been able to come up with anything different or better. The few times one of the communities has tried, they’ve lost residents to other nearby communities.

  I shared all of this, including the marijuana dispensary part, with the Filadelfians and they seemed more and more comfortable with their decision to join us, although I don’t think they really approved of the marijuana part, but I could be projecting. The man who brought up my use of the term ‘husband’ when I talked about Kevin wasn’t finished with me yet though, but this time he decided to buttonhole me a little more privately. Pulling me off to the side of the room, he had some comments he wanted to share. He introduced himself as Hermann Betz and didn’t offer his hand to shake. Maybe handshaking is an American thing.

  “I don’t like having a homosexual as a leader. The Bible tells us to love each other and to love the sinner but hate the sin; it doesn’t tell us to make them the shepherd of the flock.” I’ve heard all this before so I listened to see if he had come up with anything new and creative that I hadn’t heard. He hadn’t.

  “I know that you homosexuals were demanding that everyone give you equality and respect, but what you really seem to want is special treatment. You want us all to accept your choices and tell you what you’re doing is fine and dandy. I won’t do that. I think what you do in bed is perverted and sick. I don’t think you should be our leader, and I don’t think you should be out parading yourself as some sort of example for everyone else, and I certainly don’t think you should be allowed to have all those children.”

  “Well, Hermann, you’re entitled to whatever beliefs you choose to have. I won’t try to change your mind. If you want me removed from office, I suggest you get acquainted with your regional representatives and tell them what you think. You can even run for that office yourself, and if you’re elected, you can try to persuade the other representatives to fire me. If you want to take away my children, you will have to come to SLO and talk to the local leadership team there. You have all those options, and some I haven’t even thought of yet. But in the end, I’ll still be around, and I’ll still be gay, or, as you prefer to say, ‘homosexual’. Now, I’ll leave you to your opinions.” And I went back to the main group and ignored Hermann after that.

  We don’t choose our circumstances in life, but we do choose how we respond to them. I didn’t choose to be gay, but I did choose not to hide from it. Hermann didn’t choose to be raised in a conservative religion. However, he did choose how he was going to manifest that religion. Life before the sickness and after is still all about the cards life dealt us and how we choose to play them.

  Filadelfia is a fun place. It’s
a little like the old west without the bank robberies and cattle rustling. I hope they don’t mind my saying that about them. I also hope they’re open to visitors. They’re natively kind and generous and Kevin and the kids had a blast. On our way home, we let ourselves be talked into visiting Florianopolis in south Brazil. Wow! What a beautiful city! In addition to having once been a stunning city and now a lovely community of survivors, it’s also one of the hubs of our growing distance learning projects.

  February 11

  Irma had her baby the day before yesterday. Irma’s fine now, but she really gave us a scare. She had a little girl that she and Carl named Rachel. I can’t imagine what this must feel like, but according to Kevin, she was in labor for 18 hours! The baby was just 6 pounds and a couple of ounces which seems small to me, but, again, Kevin says it’s a good weight. Rachel was about two weeks early and will be at the hospital for a couple more days, but Irma was the one that scared us. Evidently, 18 hours isn’t a world record, but it sounds like torture. Carl was with her through it all. I understand he was a brave man, too. Amazingly, Irma told me just this morning she might try for one more! I don’t know how trying to have another baby is different from not trying, which is what she did with Rachel. Carl sort of grimaced and suggested they’d talk about it. All the nurses were saying Rachel looked just like her dad, but I can’t see any resemblance at all. Goodness! A little girl that looks like Carl would be so unfortunate. A little boy maybe, but please not Rachel. Irma is such a pretty woman, and Rachel’s big sister, Cynthia, is very good looking, too. With luck she’ll take after the pretty women in the family.