Chapter 12 — They Won’t Win!
A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:
https://readmedium.com/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313
But you can start anywhere you want.
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Chapter 12:
Website chatbox (All communications translated from Bulgarian):
Dear Grandpa,
Mom was so pleased to hear that you and Grandma are safe and well. She worries out loud to us, a lot. There are stories almost every day in the text updates from General Stewart about how dangerous the rural areas are. We have heard about armed gangs and warlords controlling the country areas. There was also a story yesterday about how vigilante justice is alive and well out there, with people taking the law into their own hands and shooting trespassers on sight. I think they are just trying to scare people so they won’t leave the city.
We want you to be safe. Here, it is hard to tell if we should be scared. The only news we get is from the text messages from the Circle or General Stewart. There are sometimes short videos, but mostly it is photos with captions.
You can tell they are in the “win hearts and minds” phase of the martial law. This week General Stewart reintroduced some meat back to the ration. There are very small quantities of chicken and pork now available. He said that chickens are very efficient at converting grain to meat, and therefore, do not pose as great a risk to climate change as other meat animals, and pigs can be fed on a diet of food waste and can be part of each neighborhood’s composting program. I think he did it to try to win back the people. Mom says he is not very popular.
They have reopened the public libraries, and there is a rumor that People’s Encyclopedia and other websites will be brought back. They also have started to text international news as well, which I had been missing. This is more on the “winning hearts and minds” front, I think.
They have also started to allow people to travel between population centers. You have to petition to get a pass, and then you have to swipe your chip at the train station, but people are now able to move between cities. Daisy’s cousin Antonio made it back home, and the military has assigned his family to live in their old house with the white family that bought it off the auction. That could have been awkward, but it turns out that they are all getting along. There are so many families that are doubling up now that it seems normal.
My own heart and mind are not convinced. Riding my bike around, I keep noticing. I hear gunshots. I see anti-Stewart graffiti all over the place. I notice how people seem really tired when they are waiting for the bus. I think about how without our freezers and stocked pantry we might be hungry all the time on the meager allotted food rations. Our guests from Bemidji are anxious because they haven’t heard anything from their families. All is not well, but we are okay.
We really miss you and Grandma! Say hi to Malik and Erika and all the others!
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Dear Benji,
We miss you all, too. The “warlord” comment is so laughable that I almost fell off my chair. What if I told you that I was just elected “warlord” of our township? Well, they didn’t use that exact term. We met the other day at the church. The Amish came, the back-to-the-landers like us came, and the old guard regular rural folk came, too. Basically anyone who hadn’t gone to live in the city was there. We started with a big potluck meal. I had made sure to bring a good supply from our reserves of coffee, and that made the event feel quite special. People out here seem to miss coffee the most. Once people had eaten their fill and had a second cup of coffee, then we talked as a community about what we were going to do.
I moderated the discussion. We started by having people introduce themselves and their families and say one topic they wanted to be sure we talked about. There were over 200 people, so it took a little while, but we wanted everyone to feel heard. Then we made an agenda and assigned time limits to each discussion. We made the rule that we wanted to hear from everybody equally, but we wanted to especially hear from women, people of color, and young people, so they could speak first — before we heard from white males. This was because in my experience the older white males just take over any discussion. There was some grumbling, but I did reassure them that their voices would be heard, too. I suggested that we would have a vote on any matter that required them to contribute their time or resources.
After all that, the meeting went surprisingly well. We started by agreeing that we would all look out for each other. We would share, each family as they are able, and each receive as needed. We took count of the assets we held as a community and the skills people had. Between the various farms, there is an abundance of grain, hay, and stored vegetables, as well as more meat on the hoof than we could eat in several years. We have dairy farmers and pig farmers and egg farmers, all with surpluses. We also have plenty of shelter, clothing, and firewood going into the winter, enough for everyone. Because so many people have left the area, there are actually extra houses available for people to move into if needed. Usually when someone left, they gave the keys to friend for safekeeping, so some of the Mississippi folks in our little commune were invited to move into a nearby farm, to care for the place and have a warm place to live. It was a little surprising to me to see a burly white farmer handing the keys to a friend’s house over to a Black family from Mississippi, but our Mississippi friends have proven themselves to be useful community members, and everybody can see that they are good people. I hope the good connections between the races continue, because we are going to need to stick together to survive this mess.
We decided to look at the population of deer and turkeys in the area as a community asset that we don’t want to disappear. For now, in our township we have a general agreement to abide by the DNR hunting regulations and to not kill animals out of season and to report any poachers. The amount of random gunfire that we hear has gone way down since that day.
There is a nurse who still lives in the area but no doctors. We decided to make our nurse’s house into an improvised health clinic. Another community member offered to make herbal remedies. It was decided that if there ever were anyone who was in a real emergency the nurse couldn’t handle, we would have to use fuel to bring them to the city for treatment.
In terms of other assets, we were pleased to find out that one of the big dairy farms has a machine set up to convert soybeans into biodiesel, although the capacity is not great. That gives us hope for fueling our tractors next spring. We all have diesel and gasoline tanks on our farms, and most people have full propane tanks. We are good for now on the fuel front, if everyone conserves.
We still have a few of the teachers from the local school, so once we discovered that we could make our own diesel, we decided to provide fuel for the small school bus to take elementary aged kids to school three days a week. We also decided to fuel the township’s snow plow when the roads get more than two inches of snow.
Electricity is still needed, especially because most people’s water systems and refrigerators require it. Some dairy farms have been using their back-up generators to pump water into tanks once a day and keep the refrigeration going. Other folks are hauling water by hand from the nearby creeks and pouring it through sand and charcoal filters and not using refrigeration. For small electrical needs, we volunteered to charge car batteries for people, using our panels and windmill. That way people can power a few lights, if not run refrigerators. We have people looking into what it would take to turn the old dam on the river into a functional power generation system. It looks like we would need parts and knowhow that we don’t currently have. For refrigeration, our Amish friends told us how they store ice from frozen ponds and use it to keep food cold all year round. They also offered to share other tips on how to live without electricity. They are also skilled with using hand-pumps for water, and offered to help anyone install a hand-pump who wants one. We made a plan to meet after church at one of the Amish farms next week for a show-and-share.
For entertainment, we have scheduled a few barn dances for the coming months, and we took an inventory of all the DVD’s and VHS tapes that people have. Your grandma and I have a projector, and we agreed to host weekend double feature movie nights, and the neighbor a few miles away has a big empty barn for dances.
Toward the end of the meeting, someone asked about law and order. Some people said we don’t need anything. We were used to not seeing police in the township before the coup. We do okay on our own. People out here are generally law-abiding and respectful of neighbors, but since the coup, many people are uneasy. They are worried that all the vacant houses will invite criminals or gangs to settle into our township. They are also worried about the Circle soldiers coming to mess with us. Someone suggested that what we need is a township sheriff. Then someone else suggested that I should be the sheriff, since I had been so good at leading the meeting. Someone else quickly said: “All in favor, raise your hand,” and everyone raised their hands except me and your grandma.
I eventually accepted, with the stipulation that we would need every able-bodied person to form part of a militia; that way we could patrol the township in an organized way and provide resistance if the Circle soldiers came to try to take people away. I also said that we needed to be able to provide consequences for people who break our community standards. We decided that if the militia finds anyone who they deem a criminal, they will bring them to me, and we would decide what to do.
So the text messages from Stewart say “warlord” and “vigilante justice”? I think both of those refer to me. They even gave me a badge, and as leader of the militia, I have taken to carrying my sidearm at all times. Yee-haw!
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Dear Grandpa,
It does sound a little like the Wild West. Have you had any shootouts yet? Any train robberies? Are there any outlaw gangs nearby? This is exciting! It is very different from my life here in the city, but we have our excitement, too
Daisy, Jeremy, and I went to a “foil party” last night. It has been discovered that three layers of tin foil will block the chip from transmitting location data. There was a word-of-mouth campaign to tell people where the party would be. All attendees were to put the foil on at the exact same time and then travel to the party site. The party was planned to end before curfew, and then everyone was to get away from the party site before removing their tin foil wristbands. Daisy, Jeremy, and I rode our bikes to the park, and at the appointed time we put on our foil and raced to the party site. It was an abandoned warehouse, and once inside, we saw that there were over a thousand people dancing and drinking and maybe doing more. Everyone had one wrist covered with foil, and the lights were bouncing off of the foil as the people danced. It was incredible! We danced for a while, and then we met up with others from the neighborhood. Somebody suggested we all go for a ride. About twenty of us took off on our bikes into the cold night. The foil was still safely tucked under our sleeves. It was so fun to just rule the streets with our bikes, knowing that no one knew where we were.
When I finally made it home, just before curfew, Mom told me that a soldier had come by the house, concerned that something had happened to me. Mom was worried, too. I hid the foil and just told her I had been out with Daisy and Jeremy riding bikes and lost track of time. Although, since I need her to translate this to Bulgarian, I guess I just told her. Sorry, Mom, but it was fun!
I’m curious about what the English Broadcast Group has to say these days. I have been thinking that we in the city need more news sources than just random texts from people who are in power. Any ideas about what we could do to get some real news to people?
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Dear Benjamin,
Your foil party sounds really fun, but next time, tell your mother where you are going before you go. It sounds like she worries enough about Grandma and me as it is.
I have been busy, so I haven’t had much time to listen to the EBG, but here is what I know. Now that fire and hurricane season has mostly passed for the Northern Hemisphere, it has settled back into “normal” news, except for the news about the sea level rise. Sea levels have risen since the Greenland ice shelf cleaved off, but only by an inch or so. It just means that when there is a really high tide or big storm, new places are going to be underwater around the world. It isn’t really going to be an issue for most people living in the U.S.A., because the coastal areas have already been systematically depopulated, but other countries are freaking out. With the U.S. economy in the toilet and other countries reeling from their own wildfires and hurricanes, the world has been put into a global economic depression. International trade has ground to a halt. Countries that rely on exports for income and imports for food are hit the hardest. These are hungry times for a lot of people.
China, Japan, India, and the European Union have all joined with the U.S. in banning the non-necessary use of fossil fuels. The Chinese are pushing hard for electric cars, nuclear energy, and renewable power to bring their country back to full development within five years. They might do it. Europe, Japan, and India are trying to do the same. The U.S. was hit very hard economically because of Stormzilla and our general lack of preparedness. People in Europe and Japan have had functional public transportation systems for generations, and people in the less developed countries had already been using less carbon anyway due to poverty. Nevertheless, the near halt of global trade has been enough to cause massive disruptions for people everywhere.
Russia is making moves to capitalize on American, Asian, and European weakness and is pushing for annexation of neighboring states. They are saying that forced austerity to protect against global warming hurts Russia and their neighbors harder because they rely more heavily on fossil fuels. They say that it is another example of how Old Europe oppresses Russia and these states. Russia is offering to occupy all of their former Soviet Bloc allies and bring good old-fashioned fossil fuels back. So far, only Poland has accepted, but if the winter is cold, I don’t doubt that other nations will soon follow.
The recent hurricane and wildfire season hit the U.S. hard, but some other parts of the world may have been hit even worse, if that is possible. Whole countries were almost wiped out by hurricanes in the Caribbean. Mexico has been under a severe drought, which caused deadly fires, except for the Yucatan Peninsula, which got rain, but was essentially destroyed by a hurricane. Devastating typhoons hit the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, and two different places in Indonesia. There are full-to-bursting refugee centers all over the planet, and many places are running low on food. The U.S. always had reserves of food for other nations that were in trouble, but now the Circle is using that reserved food for its own people. People are going to start dying of starvation soon if nothing is done.
Despite all of this, the English Broadcast Group continues to give us information about cricket matches and British Premier League Soccer and tell us the time in Greenwich Mean Time in the same British accent as before. There is something calming about that.
In other more local news, people in our neighboring townships heard about how we organized ourselves. They invited me to their township meetings to help. I never knew that my skills in leading a meeting would come in so handy. I have had five such township meetings in seven days. Each one begins with a potluck meal. For some of the people who are not well connected to their community, it is the most food they have seen in weeks. At each meeting, I make sure to give pride of place to any Amish who show up because we really need their goodwill and their skill sets. In one meeting, a group of Native American people came down from the reservation up north. They wanted to observe only, but I asked them to speak if they would. They talked about how their people have long spoken about how white people’s lifestyle is destructive and unsustainable. They said that for white people to be satisfied is like trying to fill a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. We were told to not make the same mistakes. We took their words to heart, and I asked for them to not give up on us. They were also curious about our food reserves, and they offered to trade wild rice in exchange for corn and beans.
By the end of my tour of the townships, we had organized each of the five neighboring townships and made plans to organize three more next week. Each township has its own sheriff, but they asked me to coordinate the sheriffs. Each township will share food and resources among all the people who contribute to the community. People are asked to contribute their own assets and skills as well as provide labor when called upon. Every able-bodied adult is required to join the militia, which we have decided to coordinate between all the townships.
One of the people who showed up at the most recent meeting was a technician who worked for the telephone company before the Circle cut all electric and telephone service to the area. Our technician pointed out that the telephone lines are still here, and with a little time he could set up a system that would not be able to communicate out of the area but would enable people to communicate with each other. That would be a major improvement over the current system that involves passing notes with our improvised mail service and word-of-mouth.
Your grandmother is keeping herself busy, too. She and Roy have been supervising the schooling for Malik and Erika. They have been having them decide on learning projects that relate to the work of the farm. Although the internet is down, they have use of our library, and there are many adults who they ask if there aren’t any answers in the books. In addition to their learning projects, Malik and Erika are asked to put in four hours a day making some sort of contribution to the farm or the community at large. Usually there is a relationship between what they are learning and their contribution work. Malik is learning all about baking, and Erika is learning about spinning and weaving. Grandma Eloise and Roy have been thinking about inviting the other teens in the area to come here to join the mini-secondary school they are making for Malik and Erika. Currently our local Elementary School only has teachers for the grades up to sixth.
Well. That is all for now. I have to go back to being a warlord!
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Dear Grandpa,
You would be proud. Daisy, Jeremy, and I spent all day yesterday making and distributing our first issue of an underground newspaper. We call it “VeRU: Verified Rumors for You.” Jeremy contributed artwork and layout, and Daisy and I wrote the stories. Daisy has a section that rephrased the information you gave us from the English Broadcast Group. I have a section called “history corner.” I wrote a short piece about the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1930’s that I got from one of the library books we have. Daisy wrote about her cousin Antonio’s experience. I wrote a little story about how we shouldn’t use the term “warlord” anymore to talk about rural sheriffs like you. We also have a section called “community events,” which appeared to be a bunch of made up events like log rolling competitions and seed spitting festivals but contained coded instructions to find the next foil party. The whole newspaper fit on the front and back of a single page of paper. We printed out 200 copies and then we split up to ride public transportation in the nearby neighborhoods. We left a few copies in the back seats of each bus or train and kept riding around until they were all gone.
VeRU is exciting to me because I feel like news we can trust is something that we have been missing. The Circle acknowledges climate change, and they send texts out every day about trusting science. Why won’t they trust the people to have a free press? I know what I have seen with my own eyes. I trust what you are sending me from the EBG. The history books I checked out from the library are full of verified information — my love of history might finally pay off. This feels like a good place for me to start making a difference.
The three of us made a plan for the next issue. We are each going to go out on our bikes and notice what is going on around us. We are also checking the rumors that spread on social media by messaging our friends who post stories or photos. If they actually see something happening, then we can report it, but if not, maybe they can point us towards the person who actually started the rumor. Melody, and Daisy’s brother Jorge have joined the staff, too. Mom said we needed to include them, and at first I was mad, but they are both proving to be good writers.
In other news, General Stewart has declared recreational marijuana legal in the metro area. I think this is another one of those tactics to “win hearts and minds.” This came on the same day that they finally eliminated cash money. If you don’t have a chip to swipe at the store, you can’t buy anything now. I think there were some people holding out, even in the city. Citizens can bring any cash they have to a military center, and they will credit your National Bank account. Although the cash money elimination is big news to me, the news about recreational marijuana was all my friends were talking about at the park, and we aren’t even old enough for it.
Now that it is November, there is finally natural gas flowing through the lines, and our house is warm enough that I can take off my coat and hat inside. The soldiers have installed controllers on each house’s gas line. There is a ration for each day based on the number of residents in each house and the outdoor temperature. Our house is small, and we have 6 people living in it, so we don’t exceed our ration on most days, so far. I know a kid on my soccer team (the soccer season ended in October, but we still all hang out in the park) who told me that his family lives in a big house with just three people, and it is very cold. Their ration only heats the house for half of the day; then it cools off again. When the gas comes back on at 5 a.m., it takes a long time for the house to come back to temperature. He said that they have turned the thermostat upstairs way down and put up blankets over the opening to the stairway, and now they are living exclusively on the main floor. It is ironic that the formerly rich are colder than the formerly poor. I also have some friends who have fireplaces or wood stoves, and they are supplementing their heat with firewood, but I don’t know how long that will last, since there isn’t a big supply of firewood in the city. They are always looking for dead wood in peoples’ yards.
I have to go. Daisy and I are following a rumor that children who don’t go to school are being taken by the military to detention centers outside the city.
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Dear Benji,
You are right about one thing. I love your VeRU idea. Keep it up. I will see what news I can collect about the rural areas and send it your way. I think we should take the EBG and your history books with a grain of salt though. The history books will always have a blind spot because what we call “history” is written by the winners. For example, our history books will describe what was done by Hitler to the Jews as a genocide, but they gloss over the genocide done by European settlers to Native Americans. Even the EBG picks and chooses what news to report. Remember the former PFL’s Government News Channel? What they reported was always different from the other mainstream stations. They had a clear “agenda,” and even though it is not always apparent (even to the people who run the news stations themselves!), every news outlet has some sort of agenda.
There was a story on the EBG yesterday about someone in New York who tried to cut out their chip. The person ended up missing the chip, but they hit an artery in their wrist and bled out and died. It was presented as a cautionary tale for British citizens who are in the USA, but I’m not sure you should print it in your VeRU. Something makes me think that the story is there to scare people into not removing their chips. I think the EBG might not be the independent news outlet that we hope it is. They might be biased toward sensationalizing the plight of the people in the USA. They might even be taking press releases from the Circle at face value. Your job is to try to understand what each outlet’s bias is and try to filter through it.
Another update from your grandma. While I have been out working with the militia, she, Roy, Sarah, Malik, and Erika have invited all the teens from the neighboring townships to come and live at the farm with us. She and Roy saw that Malik and Erika really could use some peers in their learning process and that the neighborhood teens didn’t have a functioning school, so they decided to make our place into a sort of junior/senior high. Since fuel for transportation is so expensive, we are currently boarding 12 of the teens in the bunkhouse. They have the same curriculum as Malik and Erika: self-guided, self-chosen learning projects, with guidance from one or more of the adults, along with the expectation of the 4 hours of contribution to the farm or community every day. The farm is now humming with activity.
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Dear Grandpa,
Thanks for the tip about the English Broadcast Group. I will take it with some salt. For now, it is all we have to go on that is not coming from the Circle or General Stewart, except, of course, for things we see with our own eyes.
Today it was unseasonably warm, and Daisy, Jeremy, and I rode our bikes all the way down to Apple Valley. We wanted to see the fence they are building. We met some kids who were outside in a park playing football. They told us how there are buses that pull up every day, full of laborers. There are sounds of construction all up and down the line where they are building the fence. We walked to a high spot, and we saw the fence from above, snaking across the landscape. There are whole sections that look complete. The vegetation has been bulldozed on either side, and the fence is an eight-foot tall chain link fence, with razor wire on top. From our vantage point, we could also see drones hovering over the fence area at regular intervals. Where the fence hasn’t been finished, the bulldozing has been already completed, so the fence should be done soon, at least this part.
The kids who were playing football also told us how they see soldiers entering and leaving the fenced in area, presumably to go out on patrols in the countryside. They hear gunshots probably two of three times a week, but they haven’t ever seen what or who is being shot at. We exchanged contact information, so if they see more, maybe we can print it. Have you seen soldiers on patrol over on the Wisconsin side.
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Dear Benji,
Thank you for the information about the fence building and soldier patrols. All of our militia scouts say that although there is no fence between Minnesota and Wisconsin, there are drones flying over the river at all times, and there are gun installations every hundred yards or so up and down the Minnesota side of the river. That is a lot of fire power. I am wondering who they are trying to keep out. Or in?
This week we had a very interesting township meeting. We were trying to figure out how we would do money. There were two people who had collected quarters in big jars, and they proposed that we use the quarters as money to represent value in the community. If you spent time helping someone cut firewood, then you would get a quarter for every hour you worked. You could then spend the quarter for meat or corn or someone else’s time helping you butcher chickens or something. People got excited about this idea of having our own currency.
Then, someone else said that they would much prefer barter. They suggested that if they gave someone a pound of meat, they would not want a quarter in return because they didn’t really know the value of a quarter. But if we decided to do barter, they could make a judgment on the spot about whether ten pounds of corn was worth one pound of meat. The discussion devolved a little because there were farmers in the room who knew that before the coup a whole bushel of corn was trading for just under $4, and they also needed to know which type of animal and which cut of meat, in order to make a decision about whether it was a fair trade.
I interrupted and said that this very discussion was a good reason not to use barter for our economic system. It gets complicated very quickly. I said I was interested in currency like quarters or beads or cigarettes, but I was more interested in something called the “gift economy,” which is a formal name for what we have been doing so far. I told the group that after my recent meeting with the Native Americans at one of the township meetings, that I had done some research. Prior to money as we know it, I told them, most people might think that humans functioned on barter, but they are wrong.
My research confirmed that barter was only used between tribes. Within tribal groups, people would use the gift economy. I explained that in the gift economy, when a person has a surplus, they give it away to other members in the tribe. When a person is in need, they depend on the other members of the tribe. They can depend on the other tribal members because they have built up credit through their generosity in the past. If a person has more wealth, they are expected to give more. This is especially good when we think about a community without reliable refrigeration. If I butcher a steer, I can’t eat it all myself, but I can give it all away before it spoils, knowing full well that the next time someone butchers an animal, that person will take care to give me some of it. Generosity is rewarded in a feedback loop, and people who are selfish receive fewer gifts.
I explained to the group that in these hard times we have to trust each other and depend on each other. If we use currency, we don’t have to trust each other because we trust the currency. If we use barter, we only have to trust if someone owes us something that they couldn’t provide in the moment. But with gift economy, we enter into a mutual network of trust and indebtedness and that is how we build wealth within our community. People existed without money for thousands of years. We can do this.
People were suspect of my proposal. The coup and the aftermath have thrown us all together in the township. There are people who used to be hardline conservative Republicans together with “old hippie” types like me. There are austere Amish folks together with people who drink and smoke and ride motorcycles when they can. There are very religious Evangelical Christians right next to East Coast Jews. There are our black friends from Mississippi together with some white folks who I know for a fact have a big Confederate flag in their living room. I looked around the room at this diverse group. I told them all that in the past months I had been to every one of their houses. I had butchered hogs with them, driven their combines, given them fuel or food, and eaten at their tables. We have all worked together to make the best of a difficult situation. I told them that this community that we have made out of necessity is more dependable than any that I have ever been in. I would trust each of them with my life, and that before this is over, I might need to. I asked them to trust me and that we could run our community like a big family. It might be messy, but we will start by assuming the best intentions from everyone.
After my speech, there was a vote. It was decided that we would try the gift economy, but that people outside of the community would have to be paid in currency or barter. I left that meeting feeling hopeful. If we can make the gift economy work, then people will have a safety net. If people feel safe again, we can get our legs under us and resist the Circle and General Stewart.
It is disappointing to hear that the Circle is getting rid of cash money. It will make black market transactions more difficult for you all. It will also be hard on us out here. We would love to have a functioning cash money system. That way if we had a surplus, we could easily sell it to people outside of the township, and we could have confidence in the money that people paid us. We could also use the cash money to buy items we can’t grow or make. We need salt and coffee out here. The Circle’s getting rid of cash makes sense to me from their point of view, because if they want to isolate rural people, they just need to make it so people have to use their chip to pay for everything. We, who do not have chips, are now completely outside of the economy with no way in. They are trying to starve us out. No electricity. No fuel. No money. No Internet.
They won’t win.
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Next chapter:
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