August 5, 2062
Day five! Today I will take the bullet train down to Denbeigh for the Agricultural Showcase. It is always great to see the bounty of the land — old Time foods like Starapples, pomegranates, banana, yam, sugar cane — that are being cultivated as part of the Jamaica Heirloom Foods Initiative, which you need a small fortune of $C dollars to buy. To be honest, they are so good with taste replication technology, that if you are born since 2022, when neutraceuticals became the global
standard, you can’t won’t know the difference. Still our Heirloom Foods Initiative has been a boon for Jamaican Tourism. People from Europe and China and Canada want to see what real food looks like and tastes like. Nostalgia Tourism is big business, because at the end of the day, we humans are looking for spiritual connections and all the powders and elixirs and unguents we eat and drink to stay alive and health somehow feels soulless.
And we all know Jamaica has Soul!
In 2038 when Jamaica celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the Emancipation of slavery, Jamaica’s collective Soul became evident. This was orchestrated by the Gaiaists in Academia! Jamaica was reeling under the strain of containing violence. It seemed as if violence was hard wired into our collective DNA. Our rebelliousness which served us well in slavery had become a self-destructive force. Rural farmers tired of praedial larceny had formed local militias, which went as far as to deploy land mines to protect their crops. With the unemployment and boredom high, young people often went ‘wilding’ – for as my mother used to say ‘de devil find work for idle hands’. The Gaiaists goal was to find a way to reduce crime by reducing people’s propensity to violence. They decided to do a 24 hour National Drums for Peace Circle – a mass experiment in astral energy control. Two hundred locations were selected across Jamaica and two hundred people asked to drum in each location. Two weeks before the experiment, they started measuring the astral energies in these locations and took a benchmark of average reds (which is a measure of anger and hostility), and
reported crime and emergency ward entries. On 12:01 am on August 1st the Drumming started across all 200 locations, and continued for 24 hours. During this time, and for two weeks after, they measured the collective reds. They showed a 40% decrease in red energy, and a 30% drop in reported crime and 20% drop in emergency ward entries. This experiment demonstrated that drumming was an effective prevention tool for violent behavior, and that it was possible to measure Collective Soul. Subsequent experiments proved that automated synthesized rhythms have a lesser impact.
What they now call the Jamaica Drum Soul Experiment has transformed crime management across the world. Live Drum circles are now part of the tools used in communities to keep unemployed youth active and out of trouble.
We little but we tallawah fe true!
QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION:
What if climate change, and global food shortages made neutraceuticals and manufactured food the standard way of eating—and real food became a novelty, called heirloom foods?
What if Jamaica were to restart capital punishment?
What if violent behavior was treated as a psychiatric challenge and chemicals used to control violent behavior?
What if technology existed to measure violent thoughts as astral energy fields?
