The next draft is already ready.
You can see it taking shape in the marginal notes, in the consultant reports, in the small well-meaning memos circulating between administrations that certainly don't wish the old any harm. Of course not. They just want to help them do better again.
First came the meat ration. We know that one now.
It's coming for all of us too. We actually know it. But no one says it out loud 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 roast pork, 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 overly high expectations of the authority. One who doesn't make trouble.
And when you've reached that point, the heavier paper comes.
It's about the heat. Because you can't justify a ninety-year-old sitting with twenty-two degrees in her living room when a young family in Vesterbro freezes for the 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 flights she has taken, how many cars she has owned, how many dinners with beef roast she has consumed across a lifetime. The numbers are rounded conservatively. The municipality helps her understand them. She is offered a conversation about reconciliation. An apology is optional, but encouraged. Her grandchildren may be present. It doesn't happen with a traditional priest. But with one of the state's new climate soul-carers, a young woman in linen smock and education certificate, who lays her hand on her forehead and whispers the total lifetime consumption out into the room like a final litany, while the grandchildren light a recycled stearin candle and hold a minute's silence for the coming generations.
No one holds silence for her.
She was part of the problem herself.
At the very end comes the proposal that has always lain beneath it all.
No one says it out loud yet. But when you have taken the meat, the butter, the heat, the coffee and the Christmas dinner, and when you have taught a person to see themselves as an entry on a spreadsheet, then the final optimisation 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 is her choice, and that she has 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 to 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 out of every twenty.
Almost sixty percent cited existential anxiety and suffering as part of the justification. Quebec has just decided that you can apply in advance, while you can still think clearly, so death can be executed when the dementia has set in and protest is no longer possible. A paralysed man got it approved for a bedsore he had acquired on a hospital corridor.
And you can't really justify continuing to be 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 original sin without God. And a guilt without any possibility of forgiveness. When we took the Reconciler out of the centre, there was a hole, 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 invulnerability. And the old woman in the nursing home got the bill.
She ate meat because that was 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 ill. She had children because life had to continue. She did nothing of what she is now being judged for. She did what humans do, when they are not afraid.
That is what our administrators cannot forgive her.
That she was once unafraid.
Lived life warmly and undaunted.
Looked forward to, loved and believed in tomorrow.
THE WEST built its civilisation on the idea that each individual person was created in God's image. That it had value in itself. That it did not have to earn the right to live.
We have forgotten that sentence. We have replaced it with a quotient. And when a person becomes a quotient, you can always find a number that is too high.
Eighty grams of meat.
Twenty-two degrees.
A life.
The old should have their meat. They should have their warmth. They should have their Christmas.
And those who think they should be calculated.
They are welcome to start with themselves.
Preferably now. Thanks.
❤️🔥🪽
