How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen Read Free Book Online Page A

she asked, and I thought but didn’t say, Never, no one’s ever going to be going home again because it isn’t going to be there. At least not like it was when you left it.
    I shrugged. “Weeks, maybe months…”
    “What!” she shouted, and she didn’t even let me get to years or decades.
    “Domino effect,” I said with a shrug, thinking that explained everything to anyone with half a brain.
    “Domino effect?” So at that point I decided she was a half-wit.
    “Chain reaction, whatever you want to call it. We have been just teetering on the edge of global annihilation for decades. When something is tipping so precariously, when so many things are just barely holding on, it only takes one thing to start everything sliding. Once one thing goes so does everything else… The domino effect,” I say again, but she’s still just got that blank, lost expression on her face. I stood up. “Come on, I have a chart in my office.”
    She just looked at my chart—the one I’d been making, adding to, and taking away from for twenty years, covered with news pictures and clippings and lines and calculations and estimates that covered most of one wall—with an expression that said it wasn’t actually helping.
    “Look.” I started pointing to things on the chart as I talked. “Birth of religion started all the crap which caused, or at least helped to fuel, almost every war since. To make matters worse, most of the religions said that the more kids you have the better—this led to over population. Advances in agriculture, the invention of penicillin—yet more population because all the advances to modern medicine kept an older population alive longer at great cost to our social and economic structure, and drove up the cost of medical care. Older people lived longer, younger stronger people in the working class died because they couldn’t afford proper health care, this means that as the end of the world as we know it hits, there are actually more people over the age of sixty-five in this country than there are under twenty-five. Old people are not going to be able to survive this, and if they do they won’t be any help rebuilding.”
    “The invention of the combustion engine, the American Dream, the industrialization of China, all good things, right? No. All of them contribute to our ultimate problem, which is climate change. The industrialization and the democratizing of China… All those people wanting to live the way we live in America… They started to pollute as much as we were and that further accelerated the problem. At that point it didn’t matter how many light bulbs we changed or how low the emissions from our factories and cars were because China was just belching huge plums of coal smoke into the atmosphere as fast as they could. And what could we say to them really? Don’t be like us just isn’t very convincing.
    “All these things, every one of them, are the dominos that all got set up. Jesus’ followers write down his words, split from Judaism, start a new sect; Mohammad reads the New Testament, decides to write his own bible, starts his own religion. The Germans start WWI then WWII—this causes all the mega powers to freak out so they all go after and eventually get nuclear weapons. The AIDS virus devastates Africa, causes more problems there, and more land gets cleared. The Brazilians switch to ethanol, good thing? Wrong. Mass deforestation to clear the jungle to plant sugar cane. Burning all that jungle, burning the sugar cane to make the ethanol, all leaves a huge carbon footprint. Slash and burn. Bio diesel—what a crock of shit. Growing the crops to make the fuel causes even more toxic chemicals to be released into our air and water. It’s not efficient. Crops into fuel causes the cost of feed to double, which causes anything to do with meat or dairy to double in cost. Everything else doubles because of gas prices. The cost of medical just keeps going up and up. America is thrown into an