Mitigation and Adaptation

For all threats, from the global
To the local, personal—
Rising seas to ill old age—

The likeliest strategy
To fetch positive results
Won’t be elimination,

Victory over the threat,
But modest mitigation
Aided by adaptation.

That’s not what people long for.
People long for victory
And complete recovery,

And the slogans for coping
With threats anchor in return—
Get back to the way things were

Or, back but even better—
Closed loops that don’t slide sideways.
Nostalgia’s not for the past.

Nostalgia’s futuristic.
Its antidote is coping,
Merely coping, the reason

Evolution works for life.
An outbreak of new disease,
Itself a new form of life,

Lays waste the demography
Of some civilization,
Inequal glories of which

Get overgrown by jungle
Or vanish under the sands?
There’s a people left behind

Who prevented total loss,
Evolved into new cultures,
And fixed a mutant allele

That allows them to weather
Whenever the plague comes back.
World without end or return.

Variables in Control

We’ve decided to try three bins
To arbitrarily bin you—

In bin one, everyone’s dying
In a global nuclear war;

In bin two, everyone’s dying
In a genocidal assault

On your hometown, people screaming
As ruthless soldiers mow them down;

In bin three; everyone’s dying
In a rest home, one at a time.

Since we can’t just kill everyone,
Given costs and loss of subjects,

We’ll use doses of suggestrene
With effective hypnotism

And augmented reality
While we ask the subjects questions

To ascertain levels of fear,
Avenues of consolation.

We’ll vary orders of treatment
As well as contents of questions,

But the last question will always
Be the same one for everyone—

What do you think it means, to be
Witnessing your own extinction?