The Lucky Ones

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What could be done?

We were just ordinary people, living ordinary lives until the day it all changed. None of us knew much about how the world around us worked and was organised. We all just got on with life as best we could, while around us this huge complex beast that provided us with food, water, power, law and order, security and everything else that went about the business of keeping us going.

So, when it all fell apart that day, most of us were left stranded like fish left behind on land after a flash flood.

Later, when it was safe to go back, we found so many bodies with a phone in their hand as though they’d died on hold waiting for someone… them, the authorities, society, to come to their rescue. We’d all become so use to having someone to call, to come to our rescue. So we did not know how to cope when it was that system itself – not just the emergency services, but the complexity of society – that failed.

Of course, around the fires at night we sit and speculate about what went wrong, how it all came to end so completely, utterly, and so suddenly.

The morning of the day was not special, unremarkable, just another Tuesday and then – without warning, out of the blue, or more accurately out of the grey November sky it happened and everybody’s world fell apart.

I don’t think any of us realised just how fragile the system was. Or how thin a veneer over our animalistic instincts society was.

It all fell apart so quickly. There are still – even now – those amongst us, me included, who think those that died that day were the lucky ones, not us who still survive somehow.