How to rewrite the future
This week’s question comes to us from J Jones:
If you could carve a message in stone for future archaeologists to find, what would you say?
“We’re sorry.”
With the many daily horrors that we’re currently experiencing today, from an ongoing genocide, to the kidnapping of our neighbors by masked racist thugs, to the dismanting of our institutions, to the almost total lack of an opposition party, to the etc etc etc—it’s all happening so very fast—it’s understandable that our focus is on surving the present moment. And sometimes the present moment means the end of this particular day. Because for many of us, just the fact that we can finish our day by laying down our heads on the same pillow from which we awoke that very morning is not a given. Because for many of us, the fact that we can kiss as many children good night as we made breakfast for that morning is not a given. Because for many of us, the fact that we have enough food to make breakfast for our children is not a given. Because today is not a given, and even thinking about anything beyond today feels like a privilege, the idea of a future seems luxurious.
And yet, sometimes I ask myself what today is costing the future.
Once in a while, in a moment of solace I wonder what we could be doing. I wonder about all the opportunities we’re losing. The current version of leadership, if it can be called that, didn’t just manage to stop humankind’s forward momentum, such as it was, it actively put us in reverse. Instead of solving the problems in front of us, of which there are many, we’ve started ripping up the social fabric behind us. We’re not only ruining the possibility of a better future, we’ve invented a time machine that goes back in time and destroys the past.
In our present moment it is easier to picture a horse’s ass doing shots of unpasteurized milk on television, than it is to picture a world where your children can avoid measles, and later—shingles!, because a solved problem is no longer a solved problem.
So when I think of a message we can send to future archaeologists (a phrase that contains so much hope just by itself!) the only thing I can think of saying to them is that I am sorry. We are sorry. We are well and truly sorry.
We’re sorry that we let so many opportunities pass us by.
We’re sorry that we didn’t take the climate crisis seriously, and that we ignored all the evidence in front of us. And that our solution was to spend the remaining resources we had left to build data centers that only made the problem worse. To be fair, we were told that we were building an AI that might maybe come up with the answer. We’re sorry we fell for that. It was, of course, very stupid. But it seemed easier than actually doing something.
We’re sorry about all the Cybertrucks we buried in the desert next to the ET cartridges.
We’re sorry we gave up on science. We’re sorry that just as it felt like we were making headway on solving existing diseases, we pulled the plug on all the research and brought old diseases back. We’re sorry about all the people who died from that. To be fair, we were still kind of upset about the whole having-to-wear-a-mask thing during Covid. We’re also sorry about all the people who died during that, and the fact that we never actually took the time to mourn them or anything, but it was politically ticky, ya know? Plus, we needed the masks for the kidnapping goon squads.
We’re sorry for Gavin Newsom.
We’re sorry that right as it felt like we were on the cusp of maybe possibly dealing with America’s racist foundation, we decided it would be easier to go the other way. We’re sorry but the guilt of even getting a peak into institutional racism was too much. The discomfort. Some of us saw our family names on lists of bad people and… well. And yes, we’re sorry about all the DEI initiatives we put our names to in 2020, we got caught up in the “woke” thing. We didn’t really mean it. We’re also sorry about pulling those initiatives in 2025. We didn’t really mean that either (maybe), but we were just trying to go with the flow. We’re sorry about that too.
We’re sorry about Ronald Reagan taking the solar panels off the White House.
We’re sorry about Gaza. We’re sorry we didn’t say more about it while it was happening. To be fair we’d been ignoring what was happening there for a long time. And we didn’t want to be called anti-semetic, which is really uncomfortable. Also, those pictures of starving children weren’t easy to look at. In hindsight, we’re sorry about all those bombs we sent.
We’re sorry we stopped feeding kids breakfast.
We’re sorry about capitalism. Again—in hindsight—a system that works by extracting labor from the people doing the work in order to deliver value to shareholders wasn’t the best idea. We eventually ran out of people to extract labor from, and after we stopped paying them a living wage they couldn’t buy things like TVs and food, which put a damper on things.
We’re sorry for Howie Mandel and Joe Rogan.
We’re sorry for January 6th. We watched Nazis storm the capital, which was honestly scary, but in the end—other than a death here and there—we were mostly still standing and we figured why tempt fate, y’know? Let bygones be bygones. Boys will be boys and all that. We watched masked thugs kidnap our neighbors, which sucked, but they never came for us, which—thank goodness for small favors, am I right? We watched trans people pissing in alleys because they were afraid of getting their heads kicked in for going into a public restroom, and we weren’t sure what to do about that, other than—you know—let people go to the fucking bathroom.
We’re sorry we stayed on Substack as long as we did, but to be fair it monetized really well.
Mostly, though, we’re sorry we gave up. It all seemed very hard. We let a lot of stuff go by. We were going to fix it all in the next election. Also, we read something on Reddit about how the best way to fix it was to let it all crash, and then rebuild, and there’s a certain logic to that. We didn’t think about all the people who’d get killed on the way to the collapse. So yeah, I think we might’ve fucked that up. Getting to tomorrow felt like more than we could handle.
We’re sorry we don’t have another chance to do this over. Because if we did, we wouldn’t have folded so quickly. If we had another chance we would’ve chased ICE out of our neighborhoods. If we had another chance we would’ve demanded that our schools teach an honest history of the past. If we had another chance we would’ve demanded, and voted for, an opposition leadership that called these Nazis out. If we had another chance we would’ve stood up for Palestine, we would’ve stood up for trans kids, we would’ve stood up for racial equity, we would’ve stood up for bodily autonomy. If we had another chance we would’ve unionized our workplace and told our managers that we wouldn’t build the torment nexus. If we had another chance we would’ve said hello to our neighbors. If we had another chance we would’ve told everyone that we loved exactly how much we loved them. If we had another chance we’d all be in the street until everyone could go to the doctor, until everyone could eat when they were hungry, until everyone had a safe place to sleep. If we had another chance we would’ve done all these things, and more. In hindsight we realize it would’ve taken all those things, and more.
We are sorry. We are well and truly sorry.
We wish we could rewrite the present, and write something else for you on this stone.
🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it. I’ll try not to write more than one sarcastic thing a year. I promise.
❤️🔥 In exchange for making you read this newsletter (I was in a mood) here’s a very hopeful essay from Rebecca Solnit that is very much worth your time.
📕 Last Wednesday I got to hang out with the DSA Labor Reading Group in SF and we talked about Ruined by Design. We had a great conversation, and it showed me that the book is still timely.
📹 Every single item in this video is important to the story.
🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. We are starving the people of Palestine.
🏳️⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline. We said we would protect trans kids, now we have to do it.
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