What will people say of our present time when none of us, but relics of our human-moment, remain?
If we bomb—or simply unculture—ourselves back to the Stone Age, what will be made of a combine? Will it be a giant insect, still possessive of its exoskeleton, of materials unlike any smaller bug, and its insides hollowed and empty, ossification of cavities and vessels still possessing shape in metal and materialed form?
Of Christ and Christianity, Rosaries and Crucifixes especially: will we be taught as a tribe of cannibals—eating of the flesh, drinking of the blood—a culture fixated on human sacrifice?
Will any of New Testament and Jesus’ New Commandment remain: to love your neighbor as your self…to love one another as I have loved you?
What will be future-man? Will there be man, or civilization at all?
I remember my first deployment—a MEU float through the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf—walking a street in Thessaloniki where suddenly the street gave way, a ten foot hole into an entirely different city and time buried and preserved beneath our living now.
We do not build for posterity any longer. Nothing of our present time, architecturally will remain (we can’t even keep a sports stadium for a generation; what will become of plywood and drywall subdivisions? Will any of our literature remain? Art? Music?
I think some days on the hole in the street: two thousand years into future—looking into hole in street and entryway into our age—what would someone find? What would they make and determine of this present-day that is ours? Will there be anything at all?