During the early days of The Last Great Forgetting, the world as we once knew it, scores of people, places of worship, places of business, dead names in phone books, address books taken from suburban homes and wealthy mansions, classic novels that incited any and all passions were disposed of, courtesy of charities who claimed to be sending books en masse to Third World countries, although some of us with greying hair suspected far grimmer motives and actual outcomes.
The next generation were systematically brainwashed, I mean educated, for vast sums of money, which by the by, became as obsolete as the books, the one or two billion souls, along with lead-filled, asbestos-floored secondary schools, razed in the same swath as senior citizen villages, low-income housing, military bases, or anything remotely threatening to our dwindling water supply, global warming, and the supposed generosity of the new government. Our source of knowledge was reliable, the old fashioned grapevine of former old wives' tales, OFGFOWT, for those of you who want facts.
Museums and libraries, once shrines to Art and Science, even Mathematics were bulldozed beyond recognition then quickly covered over by urban planning and design robots with low-maintenance greenery, a concept popular in a land once known as Japan. These genetically altered plants grew rapidly after the so-called Raze For All Races, RFAR for short, printed on free T-shirts in every color imaginable. An elite squadron of drone-ish sexless soldiers, whose original sole purpose was covering up the sins of the secretive government, gave out the T-shirts on the third Monday of every month.
Elections were still held for the pomp and circumstance, the elaborate designer dresses, designer suits, designer shoes and outrageous hats, but the actual designers had long been imprisoned somewhere dangerously close to death, if not death itself. That device called media, once ludicrously free, was now united worldwide, with pre-recorded weather reports carefully edited so the remaining billion sterile humans could continue to talk about the weather, laughing at its inaccuracies, clueless to the subtle slant of commercials and advertisements for items they did not need, like cars, vacation getaways, and poets.
These days, there are not many who remember the previous Forgettings, except for a small and significant rebel group once dubbed Baby Boomers who meet in secrecy, keeping track in code on the walls of caves we dug with our hands until they bled, as gloves of any variety had been banned ages ago. Leather, wool, whimsical, fingerless, church gloves, gardening gloves, winter gloves, all gone in The Great Hole, a place surrounded by bloodless beings with no feelings somewhere in the lands once known as The Midwest, where the buffalo allegedly roamed and the former government kept the Native Peoples separate, full of alcohol, gambling, weaving baskets and selling silver trinkets to tourists.
We use words no longer in common parlance or dictionaries which were also banned, bound and determined to keep the memories, the words, the names, the forgettings alive as long as possible which is why we've become clandestine cave dwellers. To those who find our codes and bones one day in the dim future if the planet survives, please know we did this to stay sane during an insane time, when most was lost or disappearing. We did this for you, descendants of The New Darkness, so that perhaps there will be some among you who continue to carry the spark of enlightenment, for we were once promised Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.