The next draft is already prepared.
You can see it taking shape in the marginal notes, in the consultant reports, in the small well-meaning memos circulating between agencies that certainly don't wish the old any harm. Of course not. They just want to help them do well again.
First came the meat ration. We know that one now.
It will come to all the rest of us too. We know that really. But no one says it aloud yet, because no one wants to acknowledge that we no longer live where we still wish to believe we do.
Soon comes the butter ration, because dairy products have turned out to burden the atmosphere more than anyone knew, back when she stood at the stove with her mother learning to make roast beef.
Then comes the climate-corrected coffee cup, a small cup in biodegradable material, allocated after a conversation with the nursing home's sustainability mentor.
Then comes the Christmas menu with a homemade lentil ragout served beside a symbolic slice of pork roast, a single slice, so the ritual is preserved without the climate taking damage.
Then comes the digital application form for whipped cream on her birthday, to be filled out by a relative, preferably a daughter, preferably one without too-high expectations of the authorities. One who doesn't make trouble.
And when you've reached that point, comes the heavier paper.
It's about the heat. Because you can't justify a ninety-four-year-old sitting with twenty-two degrees in her room when a young family on Vesterbro is freezing their hands off for principles.
The blanket replaces the radiator. The socks replace the blanket. In the end she sits in her own body trying to remember what warmth actually was.
Simultaneously they develop a generational account. A small calculation of how many plane trips she's taken, how many cars she's owned, how many dinners with beef roast she's consumed over a life. The numbers are rounded conservatively. The municipality helps her understand them. She's offered a conversation about reconciliation. An apology is optional, but encouraged. Her grandchildren may attend. It's not conducted with a traditional priest. But one of the state's new climate soul-carers, a young woman in a linen tunic with an education certificate, who lays her hand on her forehead and whispers the total life consumption out into the room like a final litany, while the grandchildren light a recycled tallow candle and hold a minute's silence for the coming generations.
No one holds silence for her.
She was one of the problems herself.
At the very last comes the proposal that has always lain beneath everything.
No one says it aloud yet. But when you've taken the meat, the butter, the heat, the coffee and the Christmas dinner, and when you've taught a human to see herself as an item on a spreadsheet, then the final optimization is quite easy to present.
They don't call it what it is.
Because no words mean anything real anymore - it all turns upside down.
They call it dignity. They call it self-determination. They call it liberation. They put forward a form and say it's her choice, and that she's done so much for her grandchildren by making it.
And Canada has shown the way - it only takes a few years from the first well-meaning legislative proposal until you're counting the deaths in thousands. The program is called Medical Assistance in Dying. It was passed in 2016 under strict conditions, incurable illness, imminent death, consent from two doctors.
By 2024 it had grown to over sixteen thousand people a year. Five point one percent of all deaths in the country. One in twenty.
Nearly sixty percent cited existential anxiety and suffering as part of the justification. Quebec has just decided you can apply in advance, while you can still think clearly, so death can be carried out when dementia has entered and protest is no longer possible. A paralyzed man received it for a bedsore he'd gotten in a hospital corridor.
And really you can't justify staying alive either - think of the climate!?
That's how it always ends.
Because this is not climate policy. Climate is the costume. Behind it sits something much older.
It's a kind of Christianity without Christ. An inherited sin without God. And a guilt without any possibility of forgiveness. When we took the Reconciler out of the center, a hole appeared, and the hole was filled by that class of people who cannot bear their own conscience, and who therefore move it onto others.
Marxism taught them to read history as class guilt. Technocracy gave them a spreadsheet. Climate gave them moral unassailability. And the old woman in the nursing home got the bill.
She ate meat because that's what humans had done for a hundred thousand years. She heated her home because she didn't want to freeze. And preferably wanted to survive. And not be sick. She had children because life had to continue. She did nothing she's now being judged for. She did what humans do when they're not afraid.
That's what our administrators cannot forgive her for.
That she was once unafraid.
Lived life heartily and undaunted.
Looked forward to, loved and believed in tomorrow.
THE WEST built its civilization on the idea that each individual human was created in God's image. That it had value in itself. That it didn't have to earn the right to live.
We have forgotten that sentence. We have replaced it with a quotient. And when a human becomes a quotient, you can always find a number that's too high.
Eighty grams of meat.
Twenty-two degrees.
A life.
The old should have their meat. They should have their heat. They should have their Christmas.
And those who think they should be calculated.
They're welcome to start with themselves.
Preferably now. Thanks.
❤️🔥🪽
