#this man grew up reading eat the rich guillotine bezos jokes on tumblr

[theoppositeofprofound]

I’m going a wild about John again, because imagine. You are a little boy born in Aotearoa in 2005 or 2006. Not very poor but not very rich, you grow up playing with hand me down toys your mum played with decades ago, buying your best friend down the street mince pies cause your allowance is a little bigger than his. You’re Māori and proud of it but you’re only tv-and-preschool conversational in Te Reo, you know your descent by heart but you also once won a bet with it. You love the earth the way everyone does, fiercely but absently. You love people so much it sometimes hurts. You’re young and so certain you’re going to change the world. This is the generation!

You’re also very, very clever, so clever that you get a scholarship to an expensive boy’s school your nana could never afford on her own. You wow all the teachers, stay at the top of the pack, pick up a glib attitude to fend off any attacks, learn a certain disdain for your crueler, more entitled classmates. The strength of your grades keeps you at top unis all the way through your terminal degree and you learn to loathe the rich kids who buy a new iPad every year and assume they’ll always have a escape from the consequences of their actions. Between academics you do a bit of light activism, some climate strikes, some protests.

After all, you’ve grown up in a world slowly dying and your youthful certainty that this is the generation to fix things is giving way to mild panic. Nothing you can’t joke about on twitter, but enough to have you rethinking your career. People are dying out there.

You devote everything to medicine, do a few years with the Peace Corp, see the victims of the first droughts and floods. You help develop a more method of freezing food-to cut down on global transportation costs, reduce emissions, reduce global food shortages. It never gets fully implemented because companies don’t want to switch over, no incentive they say. You campaign in that for years. As you do you start to think, what if we could freeze people instead of food? Save them, put them on ice until the earth can heal. You make more contacts in the medical field, an enterprising duo working in human cryogenetics who haven’t already gone to suck up to the fat cats. Your collaborative research shows great promise with victims of acute injury but you’re still working on scale and a few other kinks.

In the meantime, your earth is dying. You see your own country begin to drown. The extinctions kick into full gear, the Great Barrier Reef goes two decades earlier than anticipated. The human population hits 10 billion by the time you’re thirty five, as birth control availability gets scarce in crisis hit areas. Desertification exacerbates starvation. The last typhoon season kicked off a refugee crisis that turned your own nation—your own nation!— nasty with selfishness.

It’s getting harder and harder to justify putting humans on ice on earth, not when their security could be so easily compromised. Mars is a nonstarter, only idiots try to go to Mars. No, you have to look farther. You stake your whole career on a plan as reckless as it is brilliant and you’re so sure that for once the world will go right! This is the generation that will save the world, and just in the nick of time.

They cancel your project, they shutter your facilities. They give no true explanation, only a refusal. For the first time in your life you know despair, true and absolute.

And for a moment in that heartbreak, that bubbling, scorching fury, you feel an echo of the planet’s pain. A child of the land, raised on promises that you alone can protect the earth, you find that for once you’ve been given a miracle.