The bright and clear October day could not have been more
beautiful. The sky was the deep
signature blue of the autumn dry season in the Kentucky hill country - though
there had been plenty of rain so far this season and the “bluegrass” could not
have been greener. The Muscovy ducks
that had taken up residence in the pond that supplied water to the cattle were
waddling up the gravel driveway on their daily journey to pick up the corn and
oats that had fallen from the horses’ mouths onto the cement floor of the two
story barn. The morning dew was thick and heavy on the grass and that moisture had
soaked through the toes of his heavy leather work boots and made his feet cold,
but only for a little while. Soon the sun would beam over the treetops to the
east of the house and barns and down on the hayfield that fell away downhill
towards the sun rise. The morning dew would lose this battle with every dawn
yet never failed to regroup overnight to face a fresh assault at the break of
each day.
He walked
along looking down at his dew-wet boots.
The spring
foals of the workhorses, now nearly weaned, followed their massive and muscular
mothers on the trail that led from the lower pasture up to the barn for the
morning ritual of corn doled out into the grain receptacles, little wooden
boxes that adjoined the larger hay boxes along the feeding trough that ran the
length of the ten tie stalls. The babies were not admitted to the barn and
would call to their mothers for reassurance from the barnyard.
The cows,
bred in early winter, were calving now. It seemed that most mornings at this
time of year he was introduced to a new member of the herd by a protective mama
cow. The milking stands and cheese making station would be busy.
Baby chicks
destined for spring laying duties could be heard from their brooding boxes on
the shelves just off of the milking parlor. He could smell the kerosene from
the lamps that were lit to keep the chicks warm as he passed.
Writers and
other city dwellers credit the spring for the buoyant surge of life but the
evidence of autumn’s contribution to the mystery abounded here on this ranch. If
spring was the time of renewal autumn was the time of preparation and the
foundation upon which life’s renewal would be built.
Ezra picked up a clump of earth
from the garden in his hand as he walked along the ground where the hayfield
and the garden met, turned it over in his hands and sniffed it before returning
it to the turf beneath his feet. The smell of organic matter decaying within
the damp clump of dirt from the well cared for garden in this autumn season was
as familiar and comforting to him as morning coffee is to any commuting office
drone. Ezra had worked the earth here
with his bare hands for the past 35 years and would soon return to the earth he
had worked so prodigiously himself.
He was dying.
This was no tragedy. No death after
the age of 50 is, and he had lived much longer than that. No, tragedy, he thought, was outliving your life. The entire
world had learned this brutal truth over the last 30 years.
When The Great Cure had been discovered 30 years prior it had been celebrated
the world over at the time as the apex in human progress - but it would come to
be a brutal lesson on the phenomenon of unintended consequences and the
exclamation point on the saying Be
careful what you ask for – you may just get it.
The
Great Cure ended the curse of cancer in mankind. In point of fact, The Great Cure had cured most of the
deadly diseases caused by the decline in the immune system’s function as a
result of age. At the time of The Great
Cure’s discovery, people in the West had a life expectancy of roughly 79
years. Today, nearly everyone lived until 115. For some reason still unknown to
science few saw their 116th birthday but almost everyone saw 115. The team of
researchers, not one of them a physician, that made the discovery were heralded
as heroes. Wealth and fame ensued and the Nobel Prize bestowed. The world
celebrated life’s cheating of death. Family’s danced with loved ones who were
so recently at death’s door and welcomed them back to health and life. But spring was not meant to be eternal nor
summer endless. Autumn and winter and the endless flow of seasons would not be
interrupted without cost – a cost humanity could not even begin to imagine
during those heady days of The Great Cure.
Over the 30 years since The Great Cure
the convulsions of its impact on mankind were still reverberating across the
planet.
“The Cure Has Been Found!!!!” Echoed
across the planet on every web site, TV news channel, and radio broadcast. The
celebrations seemed endless, but after several years mankind settled down into
the new normal where no one seemed to die. Death by accident became even more
tragic given that life now seemed so permanent. But nature and politics abhor a
vacuum.
The AARP political party seized
power from the Democrats and the Freedomcrats (there was a political party
called the Republicans but with their insistence upon the rejection of science
they simply winked out of existence) as easily as any viral disease invades a
willing and defenseless host, multiplying and conquering the host before it
understood the threat. It was all just simple mathematics and demographics. The
baby boomer generation and their older siblings didn’t die at 79. They all
lived to be 115. Within a generation the average age of the people living in
the United States and the industrial West was raised from 37 to 65, but the
ramifications of The Great Cure went
far beyond cheating death.
The
Great Cure was derived from fetal brain cells - and not just any fetal
brain cells. Researchers found that certain stem cells floating in the
cerebrospinal fluid nearest the cerebellar anterior adjacent to the spinal
chord of unborn children just entering their 28th week but before
the 34th week of gestation could be transplanted into people
suffering from a number of medical conditions to simply incredible effect. Stem
cells harvested elsewhere and at different gestation periods simply had little
to no effect.
Shortly after the researchers
announced their discovery despots and billionaires across the world were paying
pregnant women to abort their unborn children so that their stem cells might be
harvested. The problem was it took the harvesting of two babies’ brain tissue
to come up with a therapeutic dose, and for some reason cells cultured and
grown from the harvested cells did not produce any discernable results. Some
countries did try to manage the process for their own purposes but wealthy citizens
of nations that prohibited the procedure simply traveled to a place that did
permit the procedure. There was no stuffing the shaving cream back in the can.
Pandora was out of her box.
In the early years of “The Great
Cure” there simply were not enough stem cells to go around – but political and
legal systems developed that would have been unthinkable consequences a generation
before to “save” the lives of the elderly and the sick.
Judeo-Christian liberal democracies
had to “compete” with the despotic nations of the Middle East and Africa as
well as demographic powerhouses of China and India – after all, their very “way
of life was on the line” according to their political leaders. The tyranny of
the majority and the complete disregard for the rights of the individual that
ensued would have made the NAZI’s of mid-20th Century Europe appear
altruistic -
Former Pro-Life crusaders had
little compunction with killing two unborn children and collecting their brain
tissue when it meant they might squeeze out a few more years of their own lives.
Feminists and other political groups that got in the way of the forced
impregnation of young women were dealt with very harshly and the use or
possession of “birth control”, or the interference with a pregnancy, was now a
capital offense in most countries. “My body, my choice” had been replaced with
“your duty to Life”. Young women were forced to conceive by law in every
society on earth starting at age 18. Not raped, mind you - no, their eggs were
“harvested”, semen was “extracted”, and embryos were implanted – only to be
surgically removed at 28 weeks from the abdomens of pregnant young women all over
the world so that their skulls could be surgically broken open and the stem
cells painstakingly removed. All of this required the type of fertility
management familiar to any cattle farmer.
Once the number of available fetal
tissue samples caught up with demand things changed somewhat – but the
political domination by the AARP party would not change without a fight.
Nations disintegrated due to the
extreme realignment of economic interests. The healthcare industry of the
United States, which had been 20% of GDP, ceased to exist in its current form –
and now it was evident what a swindle the healthcare industry had been prior to
The Great Cure. Former doctors, nurses, healthcare administrators, and
insurance salesmen had to go into hiding. Hospitals evolved into nursing homes.
As the years progressed and the
number of deaths from old age plummeted, Social Security was swamped with
redemptions from people who would have been long dead before The Great Cure. That
funding shortfall was helped by the overfunding of Medicare – at least for a
while. The population inexorably grew for the first 5 years before the birth
rate simply collapsed. Pension systems collapsed, older workers refused to
retire and the AARP enacted laws making it impossible to fire the elderly or to
raise property taxes on their homes. Since essentially no one died from old age
until the oldest of the old turned 115 there was an extreme shortage of housing
for the young - and what housing could be had was so expensive it was not uncommon
for 10 people to share a small apartment.
Within a few years a brutal truth
emerged. While cancer and heart disease had been ended by The Great Cure old
age had not. People were “alive” in that their hearts were still beating but
otherwise the ravages of age took their course. 50% of the population was now
over 65 years old with 20% of the population now over 100 years old. This
demographic produced little and yet dominated the power structures of
government. Young people had been enslaved in a world where the primary source
of employment was eldercare. Old people were everywhere. They crowded movie
theatres and restaurants and city benches. Pedestrians took their lives in
their hands just walking down the street given the number of Cententarians
behind the wheel. Barely able to walk the Old insisted on driving.
Entire cities smelt like soiled
“Depends” brand of undergarment like the grungiest of old age homes. All
available resources went to satisfying the needs of the aged. The young were
too busy having forced pregnancies and abortions and caring for their masters,
the elderly, to take the time to bear and to raise children. Thank goodness for
those pink ribbons and breast cancer “awareness”! The world was going off of a
demographic cliff, thanks to the greatest medical “achievement” in the history
of man – and now the history of mankind had very little future -until the
“Lazarus Movement” exploded across the planet.
The “Lazarus Movement” began from
the simple musings of an old farmer from the hill country of Kentucky. One day,
while writing on his blog he simply mused, “Where is Lazarus?” and a discussion
ensued.
“What do you mean, where is Lazarus?” demanded an outraged believer.
“What do you mean, where is Lazarus?” demanded an outraged believer.
“I mean simply this. If you were
raised from the dead by the Creator and have conquered death, then you must
still be alive and will live forever. We should be able to talk to Lazarus. If
there was ever a time when we are in need of Lazarus and his wisdom and
experience, surely this is it.
“Where is Lazarus? If anyone can tell us the
value of life without death it must be Lazarus! Can someone find him please? If
Lazarus cannot be found, if he has died again or was never risen, then he has
not conquered death – and neither has The Great Cure – for death is the price
of Life.”
That Blog entry went viral – young
people flocked to read the ensuing discussion.
This simple assertion on an obscure blog shouted into the howling winds
of the Internet would be heard by nearly every human being alive on earth.
After that short debate echoed
across the planet, “Lazarus” meeting groups and “churches” spontaneously sprung
up - thousands made pilgrimages to Ezra’s Kentucky farm – and then the “Lazarus
Movement” erupted into the single largest social movement in the history of
mankind. Adherents of the movement had foresworn to reject The Great Cure and
to live their lives free from the demands of the AARP party.
Ezra paced
himself as he walked along his gravel driveway towards the small apartment, or “dowty
house”, that his children had built directly into the large horse barn for him
to live in. His youngest son and daughter-in-law had taken up residence in the
main house, now that Ezra’s children were grown, and had filled the home with
the infectious life of six children. Two of those children, now teenage boys,
were coming out to fetch their grandfather for his weekly podcast to the
Lazarus faithful. After the usual introduction, Ezra informed those listening
that this would be his last broadcast; that he was dying and that it was time for
them to move on. He then opened with a verse from Ecclesiastes:
‘There is a time for everything,
and a
season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to
be born and a time to die,”
And with that he switched off his
microphone. There was nothing left to say.
