The Dream of Neverwas (10 lines)

The Dream of Neverwas

- You pine for a world glimpsed (in black and white) via early 1960’s sit-coms.
- A world you never actually lived in, but imaged from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and ‘My Three Sons’. 
- A purely American Dream of a house in the suburbs with a shiny new Cadillac in the drive.
-  Mom (in pearls and high heals) dutifully having the perfect dinner (with new baked apple pie) set on that spotless dining room table for Dad when he waltzes in from his white collar job.
- The two (point five) kids, first a boy, then a girl, mischievous but always obedient, helping with the washing up before they went upstairs to their individual bedrooms, to do their daily homework before ‘bedtime 8:15’.
- While downstairs, the Man of the Household read his paper and smoked his pipe, before joining ‘the Little Lady’ in their bedroom (where they slept in separate twin beds, her in a neck high night gown, him in his pyjamas).

- You slump on your couch, faithfully glued to your wide screen TV while you paw your social media feed, blindly absorbing the TRUTH fed you by your carefully selected Right Wing ‘sources’.
- So you rage at those you are told have denied you this fantasy, those you have been told by the demigod you placed in that Big BEAUTIFUL (oh so) White House that are the REAL REASON (!) you do not live in that imagined world.
- It is the Immigrants (at least those not from Northern Europe), and those who are not (Born Again!) Christians, and (of course!) those who are not milk white, and anyone who is not a dead straight heterosexual, and anyone with more than a grade school education, and anyone poorer than you are, and …
- When all the while, the world you demand is to be yours never, never, even existed outside of those static marred images on the TV screen.

The problem always has been -
You 

 

'Leave it to Beaver' ran on American TV from 1957 to 1963.

As a context : The USA's War in Vietnam shifted from 'Advisors' to full military participation in 1964. The Cleaver Boys most certainly would have avoided the draft with a college deferment. 

Notes on Neverwas :

Ok - a few cheats here! Those sentences are most certainly overlong. And the final puts even that over the intended '10 lines'.

I have no expectation that this piece will change absolutely anyone's mind. Either you understand the underlying concept, or not. (I personally was alive then, and watching these same programs, and they most certainly did NOT reflect either my reality - or anyone I knew, growing up in Peterborough Ontario.)

 

Give Us Your Huddled Masses (10 lines)

 

When you were 16, you couldn’t get an unskilled, part time, summer, construction job. 
It was all the Italians, or those Portuguese, although if you had paid any attention, those older men had actually come over after the World War Two, and had already been here a decade or more. 

In the early 70’s, you complained about all the ‘Boat People’ who had fled Viet Nam (and the war your country started), and all the small corner stores that they opened ‘stealing all the business’.
Although you missed the fact that whole families were working 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, managing those super fresh vegetables that you were always buying anyway.

You bitched in turn about the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Chinese, the Samalis, who in turn came as migrant labourers, and then struggled to bring their families, and how 'they were taking all the work'.
As if you had ever remotely imagined yourself picking fruit from dusk to dawn, outside in the sun, while living in a barracks shack on some remote farm.

You demanded your aging parents ‘get better care’ at the senior’s residence you shoved them into, that being a not at all subtle code for ‘not those Pakistanis, get a white person’.
As if you personally would wash bed pans, or change soiled bed linens, or put up with the constant dementia screaming, the reason you put your mom and dad there in the first place.

All your life you have raged about ‘them damn Immigrants, coming here and taking all the jobs’, always work that you personally never remotely considered applying for. 
Never considering that the true reason you can’t get that dream job you want (even though you are not remotely trained for it, or have any of the basic abilities it requires) …

Has always been YOU.

 

Image : 'Immigrants leaving IRELAND for New York - 1874'

Days Go Down

 

 

“Things you held high, and told yourself were true
Lost or changing, as the days come down for you.”

 

You had an image of yourself, ‘a dream you held inside your head’.

Some of it might have even been true.

A person you imagined you could become, and strove to achieve, simply wished you could be.

And maybe you got at least part way there?

Or maybe not so much, more like a suit of clothes you used to cover over the realities.

And now the years are wearing you thin, steps once sure are stumbling.

That facade worn and faded, the sagging reality visible in the tears.

Like the faded photographs, your memories are magnified or diminished. 

You had believed the world was what you could make of it, but more and more you find that striving lost to the raw inertia of the masses.

The Dream buried under ever accelerating changes and a default to mearly ‘what it is’, leaving you feeling shipwrecked on an unknown foreign shore.

 

Opening lines by Joni Mitchell 

Image is the Wareham pond, October 2023

Ticking... (10 lines)

 

You’ve slept too long in silence,” Mama said
Remember Mama said
"Crazy boy, you'll only wind up
With strange notions in your head"
Hear it, hear it, ticking, ticking *

 

With ink on the new degree still fresh, the young psychiatrist, on first day of residency, was getting an initial walk through of the hospital ward.
 

“ An extremely quiet child, they called him on his school report; this patient has almost totally withdrawn from the world around him, exhibiting a constant rocking and muttering”, said the supervising doctor.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock…

 
“Opposite, we have one of our oldest patients, with an almost textbook case of self aggrandizement, who quite simply believes himself to be God Almighty."
“Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me!”, shouted the sonorous voice from within the cell.
 

"Next we have an interesting counterpoint, despite the gender reversal, this woman believes herself to be Jesus Christ, and the frequent interaction between these last two is fascinating."
“Father, why have you forsaken me?”, pleaded the tear stained face within.
 

"The other cases here are generally less interesting, the usual assortment of paranoia, schizophrenia, self abuse, most of whom are gradually responding to standard treatments and are expected soon to be released, if heavily medicated of course."
 

So it came to pass, not unexpectedly, that the young doctor would spend many hours documenting the deeply embedded psychosis of the first three, especially the rumbling pronouncements of the second, and the biblical pleading of the third.
 

Tick Tock, Tick Tock…
 

Until, one day, from the room of the quiet boy, the constant voicing of ‘tick tock’ was replaced by a shrill sound mimicking a ringing alarm bell.
 

“So be it!” thundered the Voice of God
 

And overhead, without much fuss, one by one, the stars disappeared.

* The opening introduction and part of the second line from 'Ticking', written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin, off the album 'Caribou' - 1974, which I would have been introduced to about a year later. 

Well read science fiction fans may recognize the final line, stolen outright from Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. Still considered one of the very best SF short stories of all time, and itself proof that a complex idea can be fully realized in brief. Clarke's original story runs only four and a half pages. 

A tale involving the blending of these two core ideas has been stuck in my head for a good long while. One of those formless short stories that has never been realized. It might be fair to mention the childhood impact of the classic Rod Serling 'Twilight Zone', which always was the mood I had envisioned. Fleshed out in the future?

Opening image scammed off the internet (no photographer credit given) : here

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Remembrance (10 lines)

 

So, I was in Toronto last Wednesday, November 1, on the TTC from north 417 station down to Queen east near Coxwell, then later back out. 

Ok, I get it, still a week and a half from The Day, but still…

Hardly a poppy to be seen, and those almost exclusively found on older English looking males.

I kind of understand that you are originally from some part of the world far removed from Europe.

That you are young, and the conflicts since WW2 seem far away, unimportant to your self absorbed world of social media. 

‘Never Again’ means to you ‘someone else’s problem’

Is there any understanding that sometimes you do have to stand up and just say No More, with raw force if required?

So you think it is fine to break the implied Moral Contract between the soldier, who has placed their own mortal body and fragile mind, and the civilian, who sleeps comfortably in a warm bed and belly full. 

You can’t imagine, You don’t Remember. 

To those who * know *, ‘Thank You For Your Service’ is never enough.

Telling of Tales (10 lines)

Gathered around the fire, someone asked : “Is there anyone here who remembers the Time of Troubles?”.

They turned to the one, ancient of days, and said “Tell us the story”.

He gathered his dim recollections, and voice still strong, started a Tale.

“ It was a Time of Heroes, when the men where tall and wide of shoulder, strong of arm and bold; the women were slender and graceful, nimble fingered and bright.”

His speech was slow and measured, as he sought to mingle facts with coloured words and spin out past events and characters.

“But what about this person and that?” someone interrupted, not understanding that the message of the telling was more important than mere details.

So in the tale, the characters became more heroic or evil, the events more dramatic. 

The truth of the past became a parable of warning

“Did I mention, It was a Time of Heroes, when the men where tall and wide of shoulder, strong of arm and bold; the women were slender and graceful, nimble fingered and bright.

 

And if that was not the way it actually was, it most certainly is the way it should have been.”

 

 

This, like the telling it outlines, is a fable of itself, based on an actual event. One late night gathered around a fire at the recent SCA Trillium War event, the question was posed, and a story of the past woven. I was quite surprised (although in retrospect I perhaps should not have been) that only one other had any personal memory of that Dark Time in the history of the North. So the telling (and the weaving of a tale) fell to me. 

A standard joke about my years of the SCA in Ontario is being 'older than dirt'. Only one other from that initial core group is (like myself) still marginally active, quickly approaching 45 years ago.

Image is taken (without permission, primarily as it is not indicated just who took the photo) from :

https://www.dipaola.me/en/storytelling-next-big-thing/

I took almost as much time attempting to find a suitable illustration, something that at least might suggest the mood I wanted to create. (Note that I don't share the view point of the blog posting that image came from, for a number of reasons that will be clear to any who really know me.)

‘What did you expect? - Aliens…’ (10 Lines X2)

We called them ‘Bugs’, although they had no relationship to Terra’s insects, they did come in a bewildering range of sizes, shapes - and functions.	The species is designated as ‘Maggots’, as like our Worker nymphs, they also have little in terms of exterior features to distinguish any one from another.
The range of separate types is mind boggling, each physically adapted to a specific function, all unable to perform tasks outside of that narrow role, all without any noticeable free will.	They are all undifferentiated in structure, with such minor differences in physical and mental capabilities as to be essentially unable to function beyond the most general of roles.
Instead of employing mechanisms of any kind, there has been deliberate genetic manipulation of different ancestral species for capabilities that we would utilize machines for, including construction, weapons, up to interstellar space borne tasks.	Although in their naked state each is almost pathetically in-effective, the species has significant ability to manipulate their physical environment, creating a huge inventory of mechanisms allowing them to engage in support, warfare and even space travel.
Many of the simpler types, although well suited to specific functions and present in massive numbers, appear almost mindless individually, obviously under the central control of a limited number of highly intelligent ‘Brain Bugs’, who appear to direct actions telepathically.	The exact method of co-ordination and control of group actions remains unclear, with each individual appearing to have the ability to not only self direct and improvise, but also to adopt effective levels of function outside it’s equipped primary role.
Any alien occupation will be carried out in significant force, with a full range of functional types included, with hardened surface support and underground living structures to be constructed with alarming speed by non-combatant ‘worker’ units.	Due to lack of specialization, the building of alien surface installations can be expected to be slow, but partially compensated by the ability of individuals to effectively operate a bewildering number of uniquely purposed mechanisms for construction and weapons emplacements.
On the whole, the only way to defeat any incursion will be to kill them all, with enemy forces expected to be individually easy to destroy, but present in such huge numbers and widely differing functions, that body counts of hundreds to one should be prepared for.	Overrunning enemy forces will require expenditure of significant numbers of combined types of warrior purpose spawn, as each individual Maggot can be expected to be able to mount significant destructive power, even able to shift from close quarters, ranged, to even flight attacks through use of the associated mechanisms.
Unfortunately, any attempt to fully eradicate a full infestation will be extremely difficult, as a Bug Hive can remain fully functional within sub surface chambers, exploiting underground resources, so even complete nuclear sterilization of a planet’s surface has marginal impact.	Fortunately the Maggots typically only make full use of above ground installations, so surface scouring can usually remove their presence, will still allowing for our effective use of the normal below ground colony building process.
To offset this, our forces have proved superior in all space environment combat, the tactical flexibility of pilots and offensive capabilities of even small ships able to easily defeat even significant friend to foe ratios of the single purpose craft present in Bug fleets.	To balance this surface action advantage, individual functional spawn have proved extremely vulnerable during travel in space, so the alternative of dropping asteroids from high orbit for impact effects is to be chosen as a preparation to surface actions.
It remains uncertain exactly what the internal command and control structure is within an individual Hive, and even vaguer what exists between separated colonies, with the analogy of terrestrial termites being the usual suggestion, if unlikely to be more than a rough approximation.	Just how an association of such independently minded parts could possibly function as a integrated whole is difficult to understand, with the yearly group migration of homeworld vaxim perhaps presenting a model, although that is not a tool using species.

So this star spanning conflict would rage on, the enormous differences between the parent species involved making even any communication, much less understanding and accommodation, virtually impossible.

Top Image Artist not named (from Blizzard ?) Column Images Charts compiled by ‘xiaorobear’ Apologies for the spacing - blame Blogger.  ‘Where did THAT come from?’ Maybe not where it might first appear, as suggested by content and the illustrations chosen. ‘Well, you know - Aliens…’ That is a paraphrase of a poorly remembered line from a film (somewhere) But that’s not the start either. Recently I had managed to get all three of Jack Chalker’s ‘Rings of the Master’ series. Now Chalker was writing extended series stories, back in the mid 1980’s, well before the current annoyance of 500 page rambling tomes merging into 5 book continuing epics (seemingly only to pad word counts and retail sales). I had enjoyed the original set of ‘Well World’ stories - if for no other reason than the constructed world setting was interesting. But, I got about half way through book one, ‘Lords of the Middle Dark’, and just could not finish. (*) The concept was interesting, but the characters and progression was just not working for me, too many logic holes. I returned to another old favourite : ‘Footfall’, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Despite what the cover suggests, not ‘the best hard science fiction ever written’, but certainly well up there. (Mainly because it has an abrupt cliff hanger ending - looking way too much like there was intended to be a part two that was never written.) Niven is ever the ‘strange concept’ provider, Pournelle good with nuts and bolts. They run a bit short individually, but in combination they are incredible. As a contributing note, I had re-read ‘the Mote in God’s Eye’, which may be one of the best first contact stories ever written, about a month back. Place this against two of my all time favourite book series sets (often re-read) : 'Old Man’s War' (6) by John Scalzi, 'Legacy of the Aldenata' (12 with the spin offs) & 'Troy Rising' (3) by John Ringo (with others). 'Starship Troopers' by R.H. Heinlein (Still my all time favourite, the single most influential book on me personally.) (Seeing a trend here?) After 'Footfall' I tried two new novels, as it happened both by William Dietz : 'DeathDay' & 'Resistance - the Gathering Storm'. I suffered through the first (only to find it literally ends instantly with : “You have my word…the bastards will pay”…) The second? I gave up half way through (although to be fair, it is a novelization based on a computer game). First Contact Aliens These are aliens, they are not like us. They may not be even remotely like us. To the point we don’t understand anything about them and what they are doing (much less why). And exactly the same thing for them about us. (John C Campbell’s essay ‘On the Nature of Intelligent Aliens’ not withstanding.) Not the Star Trek universe of strange coloured human looking types with things stuck on their faces and heads. (Which have viable matings into babies? How do you define ’species’, remember?) Hell, we are all humans and most the time most of us don’t have a clue about each other! (Insert the logically built alien cultures above : Moties and Traveler Herd, even the Polseen) So my overall concept was to frame up a pair of echoing statement / descriptions. One set from each side of an interstellar conflict (you recognize one side, yes?). Worked into the ’10 lines’ format. Yes, since I’ve had and played Starcraft for a long while, the images seemed an excellent fit. * The whole idea that I would start a book and NOT finish it is so recent for me. Kelly keeps asking me why I keep returning to a small subset of a fairly large science fiction collection (worse, about half of which is military SF). Dependability. Of late some many attempts to read new authors, or outside hard SF, have just been quite unsatisfying. I mean, I do write myself. I think fairly well, if suffering from ‘stream of consciousness’. But come on. Was there even an editor involved? (Seeing half chapters duplicated inside the same 500 page volume?) Why are you taking 500 pages to express something that would work just as well in half that? Are your characters really that stupid? (When there are creatures about, and the light switch doesn’t work, do you really want to go into that dark room?) Maybe its just my increasing feeling of ‘short time’, and not being willing to work for relaxation, or just waste the time available. And hey, increasingly I’m certainly seeing published works that are just at base not written as well as I do…

Careful What You Wish For.. (10 lines)

There was a sharp memory of screams, the sound of tortured metal, sharp pain, as the airliner impacted the mountain wall that suddenly loomed out of the foggy night.

Then, like the snapping of a light switch, a featureless grey void without sound or form.

Slowly there was the impression of others, resolving into the presence of the fellow passengers, moving towards something in the distance, although details were impossible to distinguish.
 

The Baptist, who had been trying to convert all around with obvious zeal, exclaimed : “Oh joy, can you all not see the Pearly Gates before us!”

“It is Saint Peter,” said the Catholic, nervously thumbing a rosary, “judging all, and only allowing the Faithful to pass.”

“With those horns and forked tail, accompanied by those imps and demons?” smirked the Satanist, rushing forward to join into the mayhem glimpsed ahead.

“Unbeliever!” scoffed the Moslem, “Can you not see the Perfumed Garden, guarded by Allah’s own Angels, sure to bar entrance to all but the Dutiful and Pious!”

“Ah,” nodded the Buddhist sagely, “it is the plane of Bardo, where all things imagined are known, as you wait for the next turn of the Wheel.”

“What are you all going on about?” asked the Agnostic, “It just looks like the airport arrivals lounge, did I sleep through something?”
 

And so, one by one, the recently dead chose their oh so personal afterlife, framed by the individual belief they had held.

 

Believe it or not, the spark for this piece came from a vague reference in a discussion on a completely unrelated topic on Facebook recently (origin hidden to protect the innocent).

The image used sourced over the open internet, no artist was credited. (search 'afterlife') 

PS - Later change to Agnostic for line 9. : Thanks to a comment by reader Forest, who noted that more likely an Atheist would actually just vanish into the void.

the Flag (10 Lines)

from blogTO / Tanya Mok / Posted on May 09, 2020 (no specific image credit given)

Don’t wrap yourself in the flag…
Claiming that you are only exercising your ‘Freedom’, against a government you simply do not like.
You live in a Democracy, there was an Election, and your choice of candidate clearly lost, if you even bothered to vote at all.
Citizenship carries Responsibility, and the elected Government represents the Majority of the population, and acts for the best interests of ALL it’s People combined.

Don’t wrap yourself in our flag…
When you cheerfully plug any passage down local streets, park on sidewalks and memorials, while blaring horns in residential neighbourhoods all through the night.
Your perceived ‘Right’ to ‘peaceful protest’ does not extend to blocking the ability of local people, who have committed no offense beyond their choice of home location, to get to work, to school, to the food store, or the simple ability to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
A Nation is a Community, and this Community is defined in large part by it’s Tolerance and Respect, it’s adherence to the Rule of Law, all of which somehow you don’t think applies to yourself?

Don’t wrap yourself in my flag…
When your associates bring along military assault rifles and body armour to your ‘peaceful protest’, publishing in advance their intention to murder the police.
You must certainly expect to be judged by the company you keep, exactly the same way you bundle up everyone else who does not agree with your (uninformed) ’Opinions’, and subject others to abuse.
You cry ‘Personal Freedom’ as you willfully engage in extreme behaviour, then cry and moan ‘Oppression’ when our police and government utilizes legal measures to contain your self absorbed outbursts when they impact destructively on the rest of us?


That flag stands for many things…
The Land. The People. A shared view of Custom and Culture.
And importantly, those who stood up for those same Rights, that same Country, placing their mortal bodies between you and those who would eradicate your ability to walk those same streets.
To even complain at all.

“We shall not forget: Remembrance Day events” / CityTV - Breakfast Television (no references given)

the Word (10 lines)

 

1) Boss, there is a wee problem with one of those hobby experiments of yours inside the main Creation project.

2) It is those clowns over in the Critical History Intelligence Management Program Section, again.

3) (Sigh) I needed to do something with the junior staff, particularly the ‘imaginative’ ones, what is it this time….

4) Well, you know the time differential between here at Control and those ’Intelligent Beings’ side experiments, especially for Sol 3 - Homo Sapiens?

5) They have been inserting wildly conflicting story to ‘evidence’ elements, mainly to see what kind of effect those will have on the intellectual development of the new primary species.

6) Ah, as I recall that was the one where the growth medium got too rich, resulting in the exponential development of the original Sauropod type for size rather than intelligence, which we had to wipe clean and restart along Mammalian lines?

7) Well everything was going fine with the evolving Hominids, into the start of them developing various regional deities, agriculture and their first writing methods.

8) Then the CHIMPS picked one obscure tribal group, gave them a series of often conflicting text instructions for moral conduct, presented and re-enforced as being of ‘divine’ origin.

9) Which of course have been badly copied, heavy edited, and deliberately miss interpreted over time, each version held up as the ’True Word of God’.

10) Those Bozos, why do they think I had implemented the Critical Thought side routine for anyway?

With (very minor) apologies to ‘Becka’, where I stole the image used - noting that she did not credit the original artist either.

 

This started with a slightly larger and different mechanism inside the same concept. Humans as a petri dish side experiment inside the main construction (the universe) being undertaken by some Power. And a group of younger trouble makers inside the project inserting some kind of 'lets see what this does' random elements. Originally I was thinking of some standard biblical stories (the Flood = where did the water come from / Joshaua and Earth stopping rotation = no inertia effects) plus some 'joker' effects like dinosaur bones, sedimentary rock layers, all being fakes. 

But - 10 Lines

Remember the Golden Era of Clarke and Asimov, masters at the short story. Before the excesses of word processors, and when Editors actually *edited* material? When it was about the underlying concept, often a punch line?

Fredric Brown's "Knock"

' The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door... '

Note - published in 1948. Modern people, substitute 'human' for 'man' please.

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10 Lines : We Knew

Image : S. Getzin / Discover March-April 2022

We Knew… 

1) We embraced ‘Live Better - Electrically!’, burning more and more coal to power our increasing demand, while the sulphur it contained turned more fresh water into sterile lakes of diluted acid. 

2) We watched the chemicals poison Love Canal, and knew it was just a warning for all our drinking water, as the phosphates that we used to make our clothes ‘whiter than white’ bloomed the algae, and choked the fish to death.

3) For years we saw the oil wells starting to run dry despite ever more extreme methods, bemoaning the rising cost of gasoline, all the while driving larger and larger personal vehicles, as if engine size and horsepower were some kind of status symbol. 

4) Our viewing portal to the world shifted to ever smaller and faster electronic gadgets designed for ever shortening life cycles, as if being constantly ‘connected’ was some kind of equivalent to an ability for critical evaluation or true understanding. 

5) Educated viewpoints, even practical experience, was increasingly buried under a massive tide of cell phone image captures and one hundred and forty character text summations, the opinions of anyone spewing content more valued that actual expertise. 

6) We filled our lives with plastics, more and more as disposables, thinking our blue boxes somehow magically made the leavings just disappear, while shipping off our leavings to the third world to become ‘someone else’s problem’. 

7) Our houses could just never be large enough, or filled with enough stuff, or have enough parking so every family member could have their own car (with extras like boats and quad runners and their trailers and additional vehicles just to haul those toys). 

8) All this massive, blind, consumerism bough on credit, ‘why wait for tomorrow when you can enjoy TODAY!’, as if the bill would never, ever, come due. 

9) The weather getting obviously stranger, hotter or wetter or drier, the storms more frequent and so much severe, but of course this was all just some plot by a bunch of Over-educated Leftie Socialists. 

10) And all the while, the little voice in the back of our heads reminding us of what we had suspected and feared might happen, a lifetime ago, all while we sat inside our little ’Social Bubbles’, in reality increasingly physically isolated from all those ‘Friends’ - none of which we actually never really knew. 

 

Ok - a bit of a diatribe. But pulling together a number of elements that have been pressing on me increasingly of late. Certainly a bit of a cheat on '10 Lines', as the sentences as composed are really strung out through the use of excessive commas.

* I * certainly Knew. Or at least had seen the warning signs, as anyone paying the least bit of attention, growing up through high school into college or university in the 1970's :

• The effects of Acid Rain became increasingly obvious (and wide spread) in the 1960's, leading to attempts by governments to control emissions like the 1972 Clean Air Act (USA)
• The Love Canal Disaster was a public outcry in the later 1970's
  
• Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in 1970, defining the problem of accelerating rate of technological change on both individuals and societies.  
• The concept of Peak Oil can be traced back at least as early as 1972, via projections from the oil companies themselves.
• The first true home computers hit the popular market starting from the later half of the 1970's. The Internet itself, at least for general public access, effectively dates to the first half of the 1990's. The beginnings of the current dominance of cell phones as information portals only dates to 1999.
• Facebook became available to the general public in 2006, the same year Twitter, with it's limit to 140 characters, was launched.
• The truly massive impact ocean plastic accumulation has been documented by such highly respected researchers as Jacques Cousteau, and Silvia Earle 
• The possibility of global climate change through human activities was first suggested by observations going back as early as the late 1800's (!) By the 1990's computer models, using hard data, had indicated not only the direct human causes, but forecast the dire consequences of our actions. 

As for the rest?

I was there at the start. I watched a generation's youthful concern turn into middle aged apathy, excesses and pure greed as seniors. I will not live to see the disaster looming, but fear for you reading who will have to live through it.

 

O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it! 

Loreena Makennitt - Lullaby

... a handful of buckshot (10 Lines)

 

There is an old military axiom : ‘You can’t stiffen a bucket of spit with a hand full of buckshot’.

It had been a long war, so when technologies required young plastic brains, or the few remaining older soldiers just got too slow to keep up, they retired the veterans out to some backwater, pensioning them off with a plot of land.

Most of them never quite fit back into civilian life, the habits they had required out of necessity to simply stay alive in the hellish crucible of war marking them as different, untrustworthy, and potentially dangerous, among their new peaceful neighbours.

In a time of universal war, the young, able, and fit were all drawn away and into the conflict, leaving behind too many of the swaggering wannabes, boasting how much better they could do ‘If only They would let me into it!’.

These ‘worthies’ too often heaped scorn on the increasingly old men and women, so often huddled in darkened corners, seeking out the company of their own kind, as they sought numbness from their shared past with too much drink.  

As years slipped by, long hoarded equipment became homes for mice, while the skills faded and abilities eroded, even as the memories distilled into bright sharpness.

And eventually, to the blind shock of the civilians and the feared expectation of the veterans, war swept even into the backwaters, and it was those local populations who were all that was available to defend hearth and home. 

As expected, the alien enemy flooded like a tide, destroying all and any who stood before it, and as should have also been expected, the ‘bucket of spit’ ran before it, leaving only that ‘handful of shot’.

Maybe it was because they had been pushed just once too often, or had just become too tired to run any more, or because they knew death was close coming anyway and figured this ground was as good as any.
 

So the old, faded veterans stood, and fought, and died, in the end often making little difference on the cosmic scale, save where it really counted - within themselves.

Image : Snow Soldier Clandestino
by AlexanderBrox Published: Nov 14, 2011
(inserted here without permission)
https://www.deviantart.com/alexanderbrox0101/art/snow-soldier-clandestino-268987141

 

I had more than the usual amount of trouble framing this one. The spark was the initial quote, which my memory (??) places from a US Civil War general. 

At first I was going to set up a scenario with a bright shiny officer school graduate, surveying a combat field with an old grizzled general. An alien hoard that normally ate all the dead, but for some reason had left these old soldiers bodies on that field as a kind of tribute. 

Maybe not so curiously, I had a lot of trouble finding a suitable illustration. Seems modern illustrators just don't deal with the concept of *old* soldiers inside a science fiction framework. The idea of veteran vs newbie, soldier vs civilian, is represented in science fiction - and has been for a long time. Heinlein's Starship Troopers / Haldeman's Forever War / Ringo's Posleen War 

and of course one of my other favourites (and influences) is John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. 

But in almost all of these, the 'old soldier' is seen inside the existing framework of a standing military. Both Ringo and Scalzi present a system where old minds are given rejuvenated bodies. Ringo actually uses the same 'handful of buckshot' quote to shape a main plot sequence in the second book in his series 'Gust Front'. 

Now, there are a number of reasons I have never attempted to go beyond a couple of 'prototype' short stories. One of the main reasons is 'new idea vs re-tread'. This is part of the reason I have latched on to this '10 line' framework (which believe me, has it's own special challenges). 

With thanks to the named authors, who have shaped by character (Heinlein), helped solidify ideas, or just plain provided an 'old friend' refuge in their tales.