The Bridge

In 1973, D. Keith Mano wrote his only science fiction book, The Bridge. It takes place in 2035, over 60 years since its original publication, but only 12 years from today. It is about radical environmentalism run amok with a “green” socialist government.  The government decides to give earth back to nature, after already protecting all animal and plant life, but the fact that we destroy microbes every time we breathe is the final straw. Cars have been eliminated, people return to the fields. The world is incapable of complex technology. Obesity is social standing.  There is resistance, but it is ineffective. Diseases must go untreated. Tumors are declared autonomous life forms, and protected.  Everyone must commit suicide, squads are deployed to kill those who don’t and then they will commit suicide, until the earth is free of all humans.  The hero, Priest, is determined not to die but to find his wife. He must cross the decayed and destroyed George Washington Bridge, hence, the book’s name. When I read the book, 50 years ago, six years out of undergraduate school, I felt it was dystopian fiction, imaginative but implausible.  Just yesterday I read of a scientist in a scholarly journal who discussed the “full life of plants, including their communications and emotions.”  Barry Goldwater was urgently warned in his presidential bid in 1964 NOT to say that extremism is sometimes justified. Yet he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He lost in a landslide to Lyndon B. Johnson. Exercise, religion, philanthropy, volunteerism, education, travel: You name it, anything that takes you to extremes is likely to be terrible for you, even if moderate amounts are positive for you.  I’m predicting that the inhumane harvesting of animals will be a major and divisive cause in the near future, and it deserves to be remedied. But ending the consumption of animals by law is well on the way over the slope.  Do you think you can’t be arrested for harming a tree or a bush? A woman just petitioned the Rhode Island legislature to make it a felony to use your fingers to pretend to point a fictitious gun at someone.  When everyone’s every grievance is a demand that the entire world observes and honors, otherwise there is oppression and resultant entitlement, we may just be heading for The Bridge. Good luck trying to cross it.