Hello, 2520
22 Sep 2020Today’s prompt: “You’re filling a time capsule to bury in the backyard that will be dug up in five hundred years. Write the letter you’d put inside to describe life as you know it today.”
“Hello, 2520!” you write. “Boy, I hope for your sakes that it’s a better year than 2020. I’ve enclosed a few items to give you a feel for what life was like, well, now.
“First, there’s a cloth face mask and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. That’s because we’re all stuck in our homes trying not to get coronavirus. Whenever we venture out, we have to wear masks. Well, the responsible people do, anyway. It’s pretty hard to get tested for coronavirus, but it’s possible to be asymptomatic and still pass it on to other people, so we wear masks and sanitize our hands to try not to pass it on to other people in case we have it. Over 200,000 Americans have already died of it. That’s way more than other countries, because the current administration cannot get its shit together on this. Which reminds me, you would not believe how difficult it was to get toilet paper earlier this year. People did a lot of panic buying for staples, but other than that, the economy has tanked. Small businesses are really struggling to stay afloat, since people have been avoiding unnecessary trips outside, and unnecessary spending since times are uncertain. So people are losing their jobs, and a lot of them had health insurance tied to their jobs, so the health crisis is just compounding.
“Second, there’s a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a copy of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Police officers have been killing innocent black people for decades with no repercussions, but I think it took being stuck home during the pandemic for a lot of white people to sit up and take notice. We’re educating ourselves, trying to learn to be anti-racist. We’re out marching and demonstrating. But the current administration is gassing protesters so the president can have a photo op with a Bible he plainly doesn’t read, and plainclothes members of federal agencies are kidnapping protesters into unmarked vans. The president called white supremacists ‘very fine people,’ so I guess there’s no real surprise there. He is, of course, a monster to Latinx people as well. His administration has been taking migrant children away from their parents and putting them in cages. They’ve been forcibly sterilizing migrant women. And of course things are even worse for trans people of color.
“The last item in the capsule is a Free Joe Exotic sticker in the shape of a tiger. You kind of had to be there.
“Let’s see, what else sucks about 2020…. Murder hornets. California wildfires turning the sky orange. The administration is slowing down the mail on purpose with the hope of interfering in absentee voting. That’s classy, when people have to get their medications through the mail. John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg both died; they were pretty rad. Oh, and the electro-beasts! I can’t believe I almost forgot the electro-beasts. They come out of electrical sockets, turn into giant monsters made of electricity, and murder y-“
ZZZZZAAAAPPPPP.