Looking Backward
Remembering the early days of the Great Transition
It was the third month of the fourth pandemic, and a sense of comfort was finally beginning to take hold. By then the sober leadership provided by The Science had delivered the low-cost and now-ubiquitous domestic airlock, with its accompanying automated decontamination systems. At the same time, the need for the Clean to go outside was reduced to a bare minimum.
In addition, the Supporters, who, due to their lack of advanced credentials, were relegated to providing the on-demand services for the Clean, necessarily faced the risks that came with outside exposure. But they were at least provided with 95% effective self-contained outdoor breathing systems for free. For this development, credit again went to The Science and their steady leadership and data-driven approach to the crisis of previous decade.
Life was still sometimes challenging for the Supporters. Given their ongoing risk of contamination, and their lack of any mitigating educational credentials or membership in The Science, they stood a small but real risk of falling into the Unclean. Nevertheless it was difficult to be entirely sympathetic to their plight, considering the generous benefits provided by The Science, including free college education. Yet for various reasons — some hard for the Clean to understand — the Supporters were often unwilling or unable to avail themselves of these heretofore unknown privileges.
In the end, what provided the emerging sense of safety and comfort were the unprecedented land grants provided to the Unclean. During the initial days of the second pandemic, when The Science announced the new consensus and the beginning of the Great Transition, it was determined that the path forward would require a significant sacrifice of land on the part of the Clean. After a difficult national conversation, The Science granted the Unclean with the enormous, though barren, Freedom Lands, in which the Unclean were allowed to live something akin to their traditional lives, a mode of existence appropriate to an era long gone — but one they would cling to, bitterly, in the face of every bit of data provided by The Science. The 23 million acres constituting Freedom Lands were bounded by the Freedom Wall, which made this arrangement possible. This imposing barrier separated the Clean and the Supporters from the pestilence and primitivism that filled the Freedom Lands.
At the end of the day, this painful loss of land paid off handsomely. The Science had successfully eliminated the Three Epidemics: The health epidemic. The epidemic of misinformation. And, the epidemic of exposure. The separation of the Unclean enabled the societal sigh of relief that came with the separation. The strong parameters of the separation, which eliminated cross-Freedom Wall travel, communications, and energy supply, as well as any trade, were well-received by the Clean, and in the end delivered the benefits that The Science had promised at the outset of the process.
As strange as it sounds from today’s perspective, it was the third epidemic, the epidemic of exposure — the showing one’s face to strangers — that was the most consequential, and the most welcome. Just a decade ago, the practice of showing one’s face in public was considered normal. Over time, the combination of revulsion and titillation that now accompanies the sight of a stranger’s face became stronger, leading to the elimination of pre-pandemic video content from all platforms. It is nearly inconceivable that our society once embraced this public display of nudity in virtually all circumstances — but then it is also difficult to understand how human society ever viewed cannibalism or slavery as acceptable.
The Freedom Lands did introduce certain complexities that we as a society are still navigating. We ask ourselves: Under what circumstances — if any — should a resident of the Freedom Lands be allowed to leave? Given the educational broadcasts into the Freedom Lands from the outside, some of the younger residents work hard to get word out that they would like to join modern society, and risk often-fatal escape attempts. This aggression was met with considerable (and justified) resistance by the Clean, but with a careful consideration of generational adaptation, The Science began offering select children of Freedom Lands residents conditional admission to newly-established fully-quarantined transitional zones, with a path to become Supporters over time. This still-controversial policy may in time only be offered to third-generation transitional zone residents, as The Science assesses the available data and continues to refine its guidance.
