Paradise lost? Or never had? by Neil Anders

Imagine a world where you don't walk the streets in fear. Fear of being robbed. Fear of being raped. Fear of Militia. Fearing of the man next to you detonating an undergarment of ball bearings and nails.

Imagine a world where your neighbors a more likely to say hello rather than break into your home while you are away scurrying about the streets for food.

Imagine a world where suicide is not the most common cause of death. Imagine a world where women do not have to trade their bodies for food.

Imagine a world where the sun does not hang threateningly over you waiting to snuff out all life on the planet.

Imagine a world where we don't pray every waking second for scientists to discover a way to save us from the sun going red.

This is not our world. This is not even the world that could have been. It's a world of fiction. A world of myth.

Even before the Solar Problem, our world was not this world. We stole from each other and killed each other. We beat our brothers and sold our sisters. We paid no heed to our mothers and fathers.

The world we dream of when are are alone at night huddled in the corners of this wretched city never existed.

But it can. We have the power to change things. But we have to want to change.

Like the old song says, rape and murder are just a shout away, but so too is love.

Man, know thy self! by Neil Anders

Since the beginnings of the Solar Problem, city officials have consistently failed to maintain any semblance of civil order as we have watched our fair city decay. Daily, we see bombings, murders, police brutality, and the continued suspension of basic rights. Daily, we see people in the streets begging for scraps. Daily we see the infirmed die alone in abandoned and derelict buildings. Daily we see our children cry out for help, and none arrives.

But, what did we expect? This is the society we built. This is who we are.

Before the announcement, our city, our country, our World, was held together by consumerist greed. We fed off each other like vultures on dead carcasses. There was no social binding. There was the necessity of the marketplace, that great usurper of community.

With the knowledge that Earth had as little as 1000 years to survive before being burnt to a cinder by the Sun, what did we as a society do? Did we band together to protect the weakest of us, to find a solution to the Solar Problem, to try and insure a better future for our children? No, we scrambled to grab anything we could get our hands on. We continued gorging ourselves on anything small enough to shove into an orifice.

And when we had consumed all there was to be had, had exhausted everything there was to burn, we turned on each other. We fed on our neighbours and our kin. As we have always done.

This is the society we built. This is who we are. Man, know thy self!

Neil Anders is a freelance journalist in Old Brisbane South's outer districts.