"I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030 - a decade and a half of chaos.  This is untrue.  The Pox has been a much longer torment.  It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium.  It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises.  It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas.  I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970.  I have seen enough to know that it is true.  I have watched education become more of a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive.  I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation.  I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III.  In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox.  These were stupid affairs -- wastes of life and treasure.  They were fought, ostensible, to defend against vicious foreign enemies.  All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do.  Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war. 

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat.  It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox.  Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.  

What is left of it now, what is has become, I do not know."

Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998