Expect Resistance

When they send in the National Guard, we'll take chainsaws to the telephone polls to halt their progress—and they'll throw down their guns when they see their nieces and nephews on the other side of the barricades. That night, we'll drag all the furniture out of the offices and department stores to build great bonfires in the intersections; we'll sit around them, passing food and drink and telling the unbelievable stories of how we arrived there.

The next morning we'll venture out one by one, then in pairs, to survey the remains—and perhaps after the initial shock it will appear to us as a great playground. We'll gaze at the carcasses of the dead machines in wonder that we lived in a society powered by things beyond our understanding; from that moment forward our understanding will be honed sharp by the challenges of building anew.

Some of us will still be angry, some will still be hurting; others will climb to the tops of the great wreckage heaps to look out into the sunrise, trying to see beyond it into the future, and sit there in silence for a long, long time. We'll trace each other's scars with our fingers, squeeze our hands together and shake our heads; perhaps someone will sing softly.

We'll stand outside looted supermarkets, pitching soda cans and hitting them with axe handles to see them explode in the air, spinning like pinwheels. We'll dress the lampposts in satin curtains, paint our own names on the street signs, throw Christmas ornaments at each other like snowballs. We'll string extension cords around the old monuments to pull them down like the Communards did in Paris; we'll empty the TV dinners from our freezers and throw them off rooftops as we eat fresh apples from new trees. This is what it will take to rediscover that we are the masters of things and not they of us. Wearing bridal gowns and firemen's jackets, leaving a swath of shatter dinner crystal in our wake, we'll cut a path to the gates of heaven so wide no one can ever shut them again.

We'll tattoo our faces to celebrate that there are no more borders to cross, that we can meet our oppressors in open war instead of having to smuggle ourselves through their checkpoints. Police stations will be evicted wherever they appear, officers will walk the streets in fear of being picked up and taken to squats, and the next time terrorists fly airplanes into office buildings, no one will be working in them.

The earth will give birth to stars that humble the heavens, and we'll have hospitals without sick people where today we have sick people without hospitals. Blacksmiths will once again swing their heavy hammers through the air, forging crowns great enough to fit on all heads at once. Driving through the wilderness across overgrown freeways on our species' last tank of gas, we'll see fireworks shooting up into the night sky on the horizon—a flare saying "don't rescue me!"

A decade to track down technicians to disable warheads and deactivate nuclear power plants; a generation to replace grocery stores with gardens and couch syrup with licorice root; a century for dairy cows and toy poodles to go feral; five hundred years to melt down cannons into wine goblets, water pipes, and sleigh bells; a millennium for the dandelions growing out of the sidewalk to become redwoods.

Or else none of this will happen, but we will have the adventure of our lives; and if we meet again, we will build another castle in the sky.