Pageant Question: Before you, there were Baby Boomers and Generation X. How do you think history will remember your generation?

The first lesson to learn is that humans never learn their lessons.

The world we knew and loved, cherished and abused, lived in and died in, was destroyed, beginning long before we noticed we were destroying it.  Humans mentioned "the tipping point" over and over for decades, but hadn't realized we passed that point before the words were ever mentioned in conjunction with humanity's destruction.

But I digress.  In the moment I'd like to describe, I was in a food line, hoping to get to the front before they slammed the gates shut.  My mother told me that back in the day, she heard about food lines like this in Russia, where they waited hours and hours for a lousy loaf of bread.  She had wondered how it had come to this in the United States.  I hoped to get that bread.

On this day, I was alone as my mother had died about ten years ago.  God, ten years?  Time slips, though the days are the same.  I had no other living relatives, as far as I knew.  Cholera took my mother.  She laughed as she died; laughing that cholera, a disease she associated with slums in India, would kill her.  "Love in the age of cholera," she said.  "I love you," she said.  That was all.

I had been in this line for three hours when, at least thirty people ahead of me, they slammed down the gates.  It had been brewing for a long time, but this was the start of the worst riot in memory.  Even without television or internet to spread the news, the news spread, and the whole country rioted.  Hell, maybe even the whole world--what was left of it.