I’m now into the second book of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks. The reason I bring this up is that when I was reading it last night, something about it hit me. Hit me hard, like a lump of lead in my gut.
The books are set a couple of hundred years in the future of Earth. Civilization has imploded upon itself and the Earth is a dried up carcass. Demons are winning the battle and humankind is on the verge of extinction. All those things that you’d expect in a post-apocalyptic story. One of the story lines is about a group of kids who call themselves the Ghosts. It’s a rag-tag bunch of orphans, ages 6-20 I’m guessing, who have found safety in numbers and their notion of what family should be. And they have a litany they use by way of identifying themselves: We are Ghosts. We haunt the ruins of a world destroyed by our parents.
We haunt the ruins of a world destroyed by our parents.
That’s the lead ball that hit me last night. I’m a pretty moderate person and tend to keep a level head, but I do have my political and social quirks: I cry when I watch shows about endangered animals; I have little patience for violence and war; and I have even less patience for what I view as political agendas that tend to reap benefits for only a few while leaving the majority exposed. I watched An Inconvenient Truth and managed to fight the immediate panic it artfully induced about greenhouse gas and the evils of industry. (Because I still believe it was a little over the top. I also have very little patience for one-sided debates.)
I believe in the cycle of life, death, and rebirth–and I believe that cycle applies equally to humans as it does to our planet. I’ve thought that humans are not the sole source of all the changes in our world, but we sure have helped those changes along. Ice ages and global warming are a natural part of the cycle, but we’ve managed to influence the timeline with our overwhelming need to control our environment.
We haunt the ruins of a world destroyed by our parents.
Now I’m haunted. Haunted by the thought that maybe I’ve been too complacent. There are some things I will never be able to change, and there are likely some things we’ve done to this world that could never be set right. But there are things that we, as citizens of this world, CAN change. And maybe if enough of us start to care it will make a difference, however small, down the road for our great-great-great grandchildren.
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