Zombies-drugs-alcohol-suicide vs. Year of Paid National Service

Thank God We Got Rid of the Men; A Story of Restoration for SpaceShip Earth
#14 of a series of pieces from a text in progress. Publisher inquiries welcome.

“Where there is no vision of a better future for the 99%, the people perish” ~ From Greece 500 BC or earlier

At the start of the 2020s, some self-destructive male norms obviously needed replacing. As the 2020s unfolded, it was no longer only the alarmists and the investigative journalists, mainstream media was more and more about the self-destructive devastation around humans — created by humans — created by men. The consensus about “these norms need replacing” is what turned people to look to women fro leadership.

By the end of the 2020s, everyone realized how many healthy cultural norms had been severely damaged. Everyone was looking at women to provide needed repair and renewal. Women were on the spot. They had NOT been looking to remake mainstream culture wholesale. A golf metaphor was used a lot: You don’t get to choose where the ball is when it’s your turn to swing. Metaphors aside, at first women had no idea where to begin.

Predictably, most pressing, the most public problems, were addressed first. When polled, women voters had two issues at the top of their list. One was keeping abortion legal and safe. Second was addressing suicide rates spiraling upwards in ALL age demographics.

You already know what happened with abortion rights. What you don’t know is how effectively a mandated year of Paid Public Service addressed both these issues.

Year of National Service replaces zombie apocalypses

In 2023 the Women In Congress caucus understood one big problem was at least easy to solve.

Men and women, age 18–25 especially, if they were not in college, were languishing, on drugs-video games-alcohol, becoming dead or becoming a public liability, instead of an asset to Spaceship Earth.

The simple solution was a year of Paid Public Service for 18–19 year olds. For most, this would be a year between high school and college, just as it had been for decades in Germany. The legislation was universally popular, funding came easily, the program was quickly signed into law.

Unexpected, beneficial side-effect? Yes, the women did not at first conceive of this as an antidote for zombie apocalypse imagery. Within a year this is exactly what resulted, at the level of image and popular mythology.

The first young people hired, were hired to make the program happen. They enrolled schools, enrolled colleges, enrolled individuals, did the paperwork, set up case loads for young counselors. Made sure all 18 year olds were registered to vote.

After the first year, the paid year was so successful at reducing tween, teen and young adult suicide, and youth on welfare, it was extended: You could serve more than one year and be paid. This especially gave many males hope, those for whom college was remote or impossible. For those to whom the Armed Services did not appeal, this was a godsend.

It also gave confused teens, a break from schooling to work out their feelings and choose a positive direction. In the first year alone of paid service, the suicide rate for persons under age 25 dropped 80%.

Case managers for each enrollee had written goals:

- Replacing addiction with ACTION, service to others,

- Creating and documenting successful work history,

- Re-taking your EQ (Emotional Intelligence) test to see if you could improve it. More on this later.

- Clarifying your goals for the next five years.

One or more years of National Service, sometime out of state, sometimes in-state, did more to end self-destructive male cultures of drug addiction, alcohol, and video gaming, than anything else. It more than any other innovation, made zombie apocalypse imagery irrelevant and no longer interesting.

Inspired by a year of service to others, dystopian future imagery was replaced with new, crazy ideas of how to be of service to SpaceShip Earth. Many of these first circulated as comic books. You’d be surprised, a few years later, how many of these “crazy dreams,” of what Spaceship Earth could become, dreamed up by males, became practical ideas for businesses, useful inventions, policy templates and so on.

Unexpectedly, looking back on the first year of Paid Year of Public Service, school shootings had dropped to zero. The Parkland Teens and other teens protesting school killings and climate change, changed course. They unified behind support for and working in the Paid Year program.

This benefitted teens and high school grads plagued by shrinking numbers of good jobs and smoothed out career paths for hundreds of thousands of teens. Each of them got to experiment: “What am I most suited for and passionate about on SpaceShip Earth?”

Q: Was a Year of Paid Public Service criticized from the Right as “socialism” and “communism”?

A: Indeed it was. Hold your question It’s answered in the Chapter on the Healthy Chooser Self.

Closing the door on zombie apocalypse and dystopia imagery

For the most Progressive, Cultural Creative and women mystics, it was not enuf how zombie apocalypse had been replaced with year(s) of national service. They celebrated young minds occupied with positive, not negative imagery of their own futures. However these women wanted more people to understand a giant cultural paradigm shift was in motion.

They pointed out our culture was exiting from a 200 year hypnosis where only profit and competition mattered. After WW I learning itself, in any whole-brained way of thinking about learning, had been we to Sherlock Homes — a metaphor we expand on shortly. The genius of K-college education had been harnessed to only producing workers, first for mills and factories; later, for office cubicles. Learning as an art was denied and discredited by males in most directions. Male-dominated-culture was a “culture of learning” only insofar as:

- New ideas bettered physical survival chances,

- New ideas were utilitarian,

- New ideas were profitable,

- New ideas helped you compete better,

- New ideas supported male dominance.

The above are in no way how any healthy woman defines a “learning culture.”

Where were the values of connection,” “cooperation,” and “collaboration”? These had virtually no place in mainstream male culture 1820–2020.

Starting in the 1500s, then increasing over centuries, economic and financial competition became more and more cutthroat and mercenary. The same King of the Hill strategies and tactics for battles fought on physical battlefields, were analogized to the “battlefields” of commerce, trade, banking and monetary policy.

The male economic war machine reached its apotheosis in the brief period of “maximum Internet,” when not corporations but their corporate-derived algorithms ruled the earth.

“Hands-off” running of war thru drones, hands-off virtual educating in college to cut costs, became less and less workable as primary strategies, became more and more destructive. Then — male leadership collapsed and women had to — and eventually chose to — dismantle all Frankenstein monsters, repurpose the remains and build new culture.

Zombie culture in the year 2120

Zombie apocalypse imagery is no more nor less than imagery which fills the void left when, no hopeful images, of a positive future, for the 99% circulate widely.

Women recognized zombie apocalypse was the ultimate metaphor for:

- collapsing male hegemony,

- collapsing male leadership,

- collapsing male economic superiority in homes, and

- collapsing male sexual dominance.

If you’re a zombie, no one cares if you’re male or female anymore.

Q: How popular are zombie apocalypses in 2120?

A: Only an historical footnote, like public guillotine executions in the French Revolution. After all, “zombie apocalypse” replaced the guillotine as the popular historical metaphor-image of uncontrolled, immoderate, cultural destruction.

By the mid-2030s toxic male fantasies of the 1900s and early 2000s were replaced everywhere by hopeful images speaking more directly and immediately to tweens and teens.

In 2120 zombies are primarily of interest to a few score individuals looking for a PhD thesis topic in history, ancient male studies or male evolution studies.

Given all the opportunity men had to create a positive future for the 99% living and working on SpaceShip Earth, women wondered if, outside their own family and their own team-Tribe, males were actually incapable of manifesting a positive future for anyone else.

Based on results, males up to 2020 appeared 100% incapable and their functionality was declining. When not competing or surviving, all they do is dream, occasionally write a useful utopian novel, like Ecotopia Rising. The rest of the time they prefer zombie apocalypses, alcohol, drugs, gambling and suicide.

Not a pretty picture.

Spread of Team Human values

As early as 2021, mainstream culture was moving away from the masculine ambitions of Sherlock Holmes and Thanos, male schemes and gambits to understand, control and dominate the world, or the entire Universe.

A female-dystopia was NOT going to replace male-dystopia. Under their leadership, women understood history had to steer people towards thinking about SpaceShip Earth as One Whole and all of humanity as One Team Human. It’s mission? To find a sustainable course, clean up its messes and improve quality of life for the 99% of its inhabitants, as much as this is possible.

More widely starting in 2022 Team Human values began to spread by word of mouth. This dovetailed with the shift in mass media towards healthy feminine values in the middle 2020s. People began seeing — and then believing in, “Things could be better.” More people became more hopeful, open and receptive to ideas of:

- making changes was safe,

- local processes for making changes existed and could be trusted,

- elected officials could be trusted to make positive changes — most of the time,

- likely improvement was the outcome, tho never guaranteed.

It became more common to hear people use the phrase “SpaceShip Earth.” Women leaders did all they could to educate the public to their responsibility to participate by voting, serving locally and making local neighborhoods more sustainable and resilient.

Cultural Creatives and iNtuitive Feelers understood women leaders were talking about nothing less than a new mainstream cultural operating system.

Next: rebooting college Humanities education

Looking back from the year 2120, once the above social stressors began to be addressed, and practical progress made, everyone felt more relaxed and free to imagine, “What’s next?” Women had this luxury of wondering, “What’s next?” for only months. A slow-motion crisis in colleges gradually occupied much of their attention.

slow-motion college crisis

Starting in the mid-2020s, multiple generations were suffering from PTSD, Fatherlessness and dysfunctional families. The suicide rate in every age demographic was approximately two to three times what it was in 2018.

Funding a few more college counselors was only a band-aid solution. The risk facing Women In Congress was:

- To do nothing, see if this dark demographic cloud passed and blue skies returned. Not much risk to elected legislators going this way,

- Take risks to deliberately and consciously re-make at least college History textbooks and teaching, if not all of the Humanities. This entailed very great risk to elected legislators as they could easily be accused of renewing the old “culture wars” for political ends.

The means, the opportunity and the intellectual talent to remake college history at least proved irresistible, whatever the risks to being re-elected.

There was also no other likely way to rescue colleges from corporate mediocrity and no other way to college teaching qualifications out from where they had languished in mediocrity for the lower four fifths of colleges and universities.

As measured by the spiking suicide rate of college students, they were more and more in an emotional and unconscious tail-spin.

College females, the majority, as well as the few males who did make it to college, felt hopeless about repairing the vast damage their parents had created, allowed and promoted.