an excert from the latest essay by Tim Hall, find out more: tim hall books

A Letter to the Future

Dear Children of the Future:

I am writing today to tell you how America died. I take no pleasure in these words, and wish I did not have to write them, but it occurs to me that somebody, somewhere, at some point in the future might want to know a little bit about what happened to us, since I assume that all you will have available to you is the official version, and as you are no doubt aware the official version has only ever served one purpose throughout history: not offending those in power.

Im sorry we will not have a chance to meet, but I like to imagine that your world is not much different from mine. I find it comforting to dream that the world is better where you are, and yet somehow familiar to me. I see you in your classrooms of the future, and note that the entire educational enterprise is still basically a forlorn, exasperating experience for all involved. Schools still need more money. Children are still occasionally cruel to other children, no matter how extreme the threat of official violence that hangs over them. They are also, Im sure, the same wonderful, wide-eyed, innocent creatures of today. Teachers are still the overworked, underpaid, slightly grubby angels faced with the unenviable task of trying to convince you that sitting in those stifling rooms and rude chairs, day after day, is actually better for you than running wild through the world, as I know most of you would prefer.


Of course, I can imagine that many things have not necessarily changed for the better. I can just as easily imagine that your lives are more difficult in many ways, festooned with an array of fiendishly clever new devices for regulating your every mood, thought, attitude and action.


Its not much a stretch, since by the end of America we had become experts in the legislative and technological bondage of our people. Very often the art of speculative writing is really little more than buying the present a bigger set of clothes.


I can see you living in a world where you are not allowed to venture into a body of water unless equipped with the proper flotation devices; I can see a world where it is against the law to question the official record. I can see laws requiring people to wear lighted clothing at night, and for cars to keep their headlights on even when parked. I can see politicians giving speeches about the evils of tobacco years after it has been outlawed, even as the sea levels continue to rise, ice caps melt and cancer rates skyrocket around the world. I can see a world where it will be a felony for children to refuse to buy certain products, or state-mandated medication.


I can see all of these things because many of them are already coming to pass.


At the time I am writing this America has not yet failed. Our mechanical society still functions more or less as it has for at least a century: people still have jobs, cars move along the highways, business is conducted in a generally civil manner by mostly decent people.


These outward signs are comforting, but also illusory. America has in fact reached one of those points in its history when a perfect storm of events has convergedpolitical, economic, military and diplomaticand, rather than meet these challenges responsibly, the country has once again responded by going insane. The question many people are asking now is: Is this the last time? Will we be lucky enough to pull ourselves out of this, at least without sparking a global war and wiping out millions of lives in the process?


America has had any number of tantrums and breakdowns throughout her short history, just like any beautiful, vain, and insecure child might. It is also a nation whose politicians and pundits believe, again like a child might, that to have experienced the dumb luck of being born in a specific geographical location shows empirically that one is superior to the rest of the world; and that the world ignored our tantrums at its peril. Despite our radically increased dependence on other parts of the world in recent decadesthe Middle East for oil, China for cheap labor, for exampleor perhaps because of it, many of my fellow countrymen and women live with the unshakable faith that we are not only objectively but innately superior to other human beings, simply by virtue of having been American. No matter what the circumstances or conditions, no matter how depraved, cruel, or deceptive our behavior, we came to believe that if it was done by American power then it was, by definition, good.


Again, this was as old as America. From the manifest destiny of the pioneer and frontier days to the exceptionalism of present times, we came to believe that the experience of stepping off a boat as strangers in a strange land was somehow different, better, more right if done by certain people. We came to believe that this was okay, because God blessed us with an abundance that, once squandered, did nothing to cure us of our self-regard. Americans have always had their hands pressed together in prayer; the problem is that in recent decades our fingers have not been pointing towards God, but to our own faces. America might claim devotion to God, but she prays only to herself.


This seemingly bottomless capacity for self-regard is one thing in a child; it is something else altogether in a heavily armed, bankrupt, and energy-poor nation like America, capable of causing enormous destruction and even extinction on a planetary level. And I believeand this is why I am writing this to you nowthat the conditions leading to our collapse have been caused by one thing: an invisible killer that we refused to acknowledge, not because we were blind to it or in denial, but because we wanted it to succeed. In other words, we died because we wanted to. We just didnt realize it.


Before I explain what I mean, Id like to give you children of the future a snapshot of what is happening in America right now, in March of 2009, as I sit down to write this.


Financial terrorists have taken control of our money system, destroying not only our own economy but also the economies of many other nations around the world. These terrorists have not only refused to accept responsibility for their actions, but have in fact threatened the people with bigger and greater destruction unless we continue to pay them exorbitant sums, and hold them blameless for these and any other acts of terrorism they choose to commit in the future.


Our democratically elected leaders have seized control of all communications within our borders without our consent: all mail, emails, text messages, and phone calls are now the legal property of the state, which has claimed the power to divert and examine them in secret, at will, for any reason. If that werent enough the government has asserted it has the right to arbitrarily snatch, torture, and detain anybody, at any time, and hold them forever, without charges or trial.


These are not the policies of one party, administration, or rogue element within our government, but have been enthusiastically endorsed by both political parties as well as their many advisors, media outlets, and corporate interests.


As I write this, in the spring of 2009, there is literally not one area of our lives over which the government does not now claim absolute and total power. There is no longer any meaningful difference between our various police, enforcement, spying, and military groups. The two-party system has failed. For the last 60 years conservatives have been marching us in lockstep over the edge of a cliff; during that time liberals have been arguing that it would be better to march us into caves instead, and simply bring the mountain down on top of us.


Television programs form our ideas of justice: we are inundated with soap operas of punishment, from the cartoon judges and shame-based confessionals of morning television to the voyeuristic operettas of evening crime dramas and bloody surgical reenactments. We have national leaders who have repeatedly referred to a fictional television character, Jack Bauer, as the standard-bearer for American foreign and military policy.


Our lives are in the hands of the most powerful drug cartels in history, huge pharmaceutical companies whose mission is to prevent cures from ever coming to market and who enjoy immunity from prosecution for even their most toxic and deadly concoctions. Whatever naturally occurring vitamins, remedies, and drugs the cartels cannot patent have either already been, or else are in the process of being, criminalized.


Our food is in the hands of huge factory farms that are notorious for their filthy, diseased, and cruel conditions, and yet have recently created legislation that requires small, organic farms to implant livestock with expensive microchips, but which exempts themselves.


Our faith is in the hands of religious fanatics who, instead of being humbled and awed by the amazing diversity of life on earth, have convinced themselves that God has chosen them to impose only two possible paths on the rest of us: their way, or death.


We are ruled on all sides by perverts, adulterers, rapists, pedophiles, embezzlers, tax cheats, draft dodgers, drug addicts and alcoholics, who nevertheless lecture us from podiums about our common moral good, our national character, the shining beacon of hope we offer the world. They preach the gospel of a great and glorious exceptionalism, the creed of American Supremacy that justifies our every act of greed, cowardice, and violence.


In order to feel anything in our spied-upon, increasingly unsafe, government-mediated and drug-dulled lives, we have resorted to hanging myriad technological gadgets on our bodies, under the bizarre belief that they are essential for our survival and somehow increase our freedom. I cannot help but notice that most of these gadgets, bought and subscribed to in the name of staying in touch, actually allow us to be farther away from each other for longer periods.


In other words, everything is exactly as it has been for a long time.


History, at least of the classroom variety, is better at explaining what happened rather than how or why. The hows and whys tend to involve responsibility or even blame, and in our misguided decency we have virtually outlawed such discussions in the classroom, at least where our power centers are concerned. I mention this only because the conditions that brought about our end were therefore visible for some time, but we were trained to believe that these were irritating anomalies, that our lives would always return to prosperity and happiness on their own, that justice and truth were immutable laws of the universe rather than fragile, hated ideals that had to be zealously guarded and fought for.


We were nothing if not optimistic.





Oh, children of the future! If I could convince you to be on your guard against only two types of people, it would be those who are optimistic about the future, and those who are nostalgic for the past. Both yearn for things that do not, never have, or will ever exist; neither will admit, in his glorious conception of imaginary times, how he is helping to make the present so much worse by comparison.