On June 4, 2049, at a meeting of the Unitary Council of Nations, the Royal Schwab, his purple robe tattered, his beard scraggly, presided over a Committee meeting, convened to deal with the fallout from a NY Times front page editorial written by an anonymous professor at an elite Northeastern college. The title of the piece was: THE END OF THIS AND THE BEGINNING OF THAT.
Here is an excerpt:
As we witness the slow crash of modern civilization, in a welter of shocking but unsurprising developments along many fronts, we naturally face the question, how do we put things back together again?
One thing is certain. We’re not going to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. He’s in pieces.
And a great aspect of the collapse is: organizations too big to fail are nevertheless failing. The first of these is central government.
Whatever we do to rebuild isn’t going to be a walk in the park. Those who think or hope it will be…will have no part in the future.