“A Baby Cries” – Guest Blogger, Karen Kwiatkowski
August 29th, 2011A baby cries. Her mother and father are talking softly in another small room, and the lights are dim, this late at night. It’s 2016, a year after the newest prohibition against the use of any metal as a unit of trade.
Bitcoins had long been under attack, and were already underground, as healthy as ever, operating deep behind firewalls and encryption and with only the occasional public execution conducted by an exasperated new Department of Treasury Defense. The black market in copper and construction metals that had be growing since the early 2000s had evolved its own informal minting operation, and trading networks in several parts of the country had become quite robust. The metal itself wasn’t exceptionally valuable, but with no new building going on anywhere in the country, it had found a serviceable new life in private tokens of some accepted value, especially in poorer rural areas where electricity was unreliable, and silver still not readily available.
There were few children these days. Like metal no longer needed by a housing and transport industries not yet recovered from the government-induced crashes of a few years earlier, children for over a decade now had been seen as costly burdens. It was a world so strained that even one more mouth to feed was widely considered indulgent, and foolhardy.
The government schools had mostly collapsed in the rural areas, for a variety of reasons. This child would be educated at home, by living and learning from her parents, as they themselves were adapting to life not supported by a government paycheck, in the government currency, mandated by threat of death, yet held in common and, at times, cheerful contempt.
This child will come of age knowing only that government wears heavy boots, and kicks down doors. She recognizes the value of her family and her extended network of relatives and friends, and takes that closeness, and the communal language her family speaks, as comfortable and good. Where her parents see what they do as necessary and sad, she accepts as normal, and she thrives.
This child will be told old myths as well, passed down over many generations, of a time when the state was made up of the people, and ruled only with their consent, and had little power to destroy. She will not understand these stories, except as fables. She is impatient. Her ideas about how people should live will be self-centered – the government netherworld is dangerous, a forest filled with ghosts and enemies. The nimble and the brave and the ingenious are her heroes. That is what she is determined to become. It is reinforced in every game she will play.
Her parents worried that their country would collapse, and it had, in waves of birthing pain, as yet unrewarded. America was functioning on halfhearted autopilot, a long cumulative sclerosis of the state. The child would know this as normal, and she would take for granted that the government was both rude and incompetent, both dangerous and confused. She would grow understanding tyrannical statism as a disease that ultimately made the tyrant weak and easy to beat, in a million small ways. To her, her few cousins her own age will be everything, her valued friends and trusted allies; the state an irritant, unnecessary, largely valueless, in the way. Her career and her interests will be framed by the ways she and her cousins and friends grow up, play, and laugh.
Her mother and father do not know, in 2016, that as she grows, she and children like her will lead them all through the wrecked country, the litter of discarded faith in old ideologies. She is not haunted by the shadow of the 20th century as her parents are. She is the reason her parents will have more children a decade later, and those children will adore their older sister, exaggerate her exploits and emulate her attitude. Her grandparents depended upon the state, her parents feared it, but the child born in 2016 will see statism a disease to be treated in order for people to live in peace, and nothing more.
