The Jackpot 🎰

In the future of “The Peripheral” (the Prime video version, not the novel. I haven’t read the novel), there has been “The Jackpot.”  It starts with a blackout of the North American grid, which lasts for months (why? No idea. Interesting, though, to start there.  I've been through an almost month-long blackout following a hurricane.  Didn't lead to anarchy and chaos and bloodletting, though that's always what's supposed to happen in these kinds of stories.). That’s followed by a pandemic (typical apocalyptic virus, involving lots of bleeding) and an environmental collapse(of course)  followed by a nuclear explosion (had to be one, didn’t there?), and somewhere in there, an economic collapse. The nuclear explosion is local, the rest is fairly global. Anyway: Jackpot.

The ultimate apocalyptic scenario: not one, but several. And you can thank the Boomers for it.

Boomers grew up expecting the apocalypse. We grew up with air raid sirens and CONELRAD presets on AM car radios. We learned duck ‘n’ cover and not to look at the flash and where the bomb shelters were in public buildings. A real apocalypse, IOW, that TV ("The Twilight Zone" had a story involving the post-war world, or the fear of a nuclear apocalypse, almost every season for 5 years) and books and movies told us was surely coming, as if it was inevitable.  In the end it's hard to say if we averted it, or just feared something no one was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) enough to cause (not that Curtis LeMay didn't express some interest in it).

And generations after us heard our stories; and they were envious. It affected entertainment (we grew up watching movies about giant animals due to radiation, followed by heroes in Marvel comics due to the same.) Movies about nuclear war were made along side the giant creature movies. So we grew up with that, too. We took doom as a given, and were relieved when the USSR collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down.  It made us significant: the generation that was walked up to the brink of the abyss, and walked back away from it.

But the end of the world became an entertainment staple. “The Peripheral” needed a four pronged apocalypse just to keep up, because a single cause apocalypse is so simplistic and "unrealistic," isn't it?  It also needed a form of time travel to set it all going, because you've got to have a past shadowed by the dreadful future, or where's the drama? That’s how far along this meme has come. The “perfect storm” has to be a confluence of… apocalypti? Apocalypses?

And we expect it in reality. Trump will end us. Or fascism will. Or Tucker Carlson. Or QAnon. Wait; not them anymore. They’re off the table. But we live in significant times and global warming or overpopulation...no, wait, that's off the table, too; or agricultural collapse...no, we've pretty much stopped expecting that one, as well....well, surely global warming will...screw things up pretty decisively?  And if a revelation is not surely at hand, then an apocalypse must be. And we alone are escaped alive to tell thee. Because that makes you significant; like the Boomers were.

The Boomers changed the world, by supporting the civil rights movement and believing the world could be more meaningful than what you own and what you do. Of course, we abandoned the life of the hippie (who were really only possible because of first world privilege), and became yuppies and preppies. We sucked up resources even as we forced the creation of the EPA and the Clean Water Act. We championed greed even as we said it was for our children (as our parents had done, and taught us to do). We were so rapacious we...forced our children to buy bigger houses than we ever owned (my daughter is living in a house twice the size of anything I've ever lived in.  She says she needs it because she and her husband work from home, and need office space, as well as room for possible children one day.)  They have more entertainment and informational access than we ever dreamed of.  We had 3 broadcast networks and libraries or that staple of middle class houses, a full set of encylopedias bought on an installment plan and only slightly less read than the family Bible.  They have Google and Wikipedia.  We had two kinds of apples (red and yellow) and one kind of lettuce (iceberg) and one kind of tomato (big as softballs, and about as flavorful) and produce was rigidly seasonal.  Our food choices were Italian (Pizza and spaghetti; we didn't even know to call it "pasta.")  or casseroles, and "salad" was iceberg lettuce with tomato wedges, or a pear half (canned, in syrup) served with mayonnaise and shredded cheddar cheese (all cheese that wasn't American was cheddar).  Soup was Campbells; bread was white and mushy and preserved against the end of time itself; cake came from a box to which you usually added just water. And so on and so on and so on.  Yes, we sucked up all the resources and left them with nothing to look forward to.

But we are different from them in one significant respect, the respect that sets us apart even as our childrehn live in a better world that, frankly, Boomers helped make possible. We are children of apocalypse.  We are the children of the nightmare act that could end it all, the sword of Damocles hanging by a hair and ready to fall.  That sets us apart; and so does one other thing.  We are also creators and children of this modern world that still seeks equality and tolerance and acceptance of all who just want to love at least one other person as they see fit and as does no harm.

This modern world is the Boomers’ creation, as much as it is anyone’s ; for better or worse. It is a continuing project and yes, some Boomers, especially, want to stop it and turn it backwards; the ones who miss Tucker Carlson and think Trump is right. But they aren’t all the Boomers; and the Boomers are fading from the scene anyway.

But you still live in the world we made. Understand that and maybe it can be changed for the better. But see it clearly, or all the rest is merely frustration. Although we’ll probably never get the Jackpot. Civilization isn’t really going that way.  There is an unironic jackpot, and rather like the more significant one of the basiliea tou theou, we could live in it; if we would just accept its reality.

Half a loaf, after all, is better than none.