The Lazarus Movement

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 28^th week but before the 34^th 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-20^th 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.

“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.