The Future Refused to Change

5/24/22 9:55PM

The image of this journal entry is the most haunting game over screen I've ever seen, from one of the greatest video games of all time, in my humble opinion.

The game's name is "Chrono Trigger", a role-playing game released in 1995 on the Super Nintendo. It takes place on an earth-like planet and begins in the year 1000AD, which is the equivalent of our real-life medieval times, with some fantasy elements. Imagine dragons (hyuk), knights, castles, princesses, magic.

Time travel is a major theme in the game. The silent protagonist, Crono, discovers that a massive alien parasite from outer space named Lavos impacted the planet and embedded itself deep inside millions of years ago, in the "prehistoric" times of 65 million BC. Lavos remains dormant for eons like a supermassive volcano, unbeknownst to all of humanity, but Crono discovers that Lavos becomes active in the year 2000AD, which is a modern and urban time like our current civilization, and destroys the world, bringing about an apocalypse and triggering a futuristic dystopia, which can be seen in the year 2300AD.

The main conflict in the game is for Crono is his band of friends-- from the past, present, and future--to defeat Lavos and prevent this.

But if you as the player fail to do so, you get this image.

I remember staring solemnly at this screen the first time my much younger and more idealistic self saw this. It's one of those things you just "need a moment" for, to absorb and process. It wasn't like any other "Game Over" screen I had seen, where I knew that I was just playing a game, just for fun, and nothing really mattered. It really felt like I had personally failed to avert a foreseeable disaster, and I watched our "pale blue dot" as Carl Sagan called it, the only home we've all ever known, be destroyed.

This image has stuck with me as I've gotten older, and the more terrible events that I see in the world--especially recurring, predictable, preventable events--the more I think this image is us.

Shootings have become normalized, and politicians don't care. Humans (read: corporations) are destroying the climate, and governments aren't doing enough about it. Fascism is resurging and the left so far has been too weak to effectively fight it. We are living in a new Gilded Age, worse than even the "Roaring Twenties", where the rich keep getting richer while wages have been stagnant for decades and homelessness rises, but our "representatives" keep colluding with these rich corporate donors instead of truly representing the people. Income inequality is worse than ever. The pandemic pulled the curtain back on our "society", erasing the veneer over how inhumane our "human civilization" really is, while accelerating all these terrible trends that were already underway. It feels like we as a species are getting closer everyday to realizing all of our sci-fi dystopian fictions--the Matrix, Blade Runner, Terminator, Elysium, whatever, take your pick. "1984" feels cliche to mention, but sure, why not that, too? MLK's last speech before he was assassinated was called "Why America May Go to Hell", and like an old AC/DC song, I feel like we're speeding down that highway.

I've kinda-but-not-really joked about this during the pandemic: Agent Smith in the first Matrix was right when he said humans are a virus. The real pandemic is us. Not even racism and hate crimes stopped during quarantine, but pollution sure did, as satellite images showed. What does that show us?

I try to resist misanthrophy and nihilism, but it sure is hard sometimes, when I see how crappy the world is and how it refuses to change, no matter how hard people protest for it and demand it. I've participated in protests. I've called my representatives over issues I felt mattered. I've donated and raised money for causes I cared about. And yet, like Tupac Shakur said, I see no changes.

Nonetheless, I don't really think humans are villains; I think human greed and apathy are the real villains. Humanity has great capacity for both evil and good, as history shows. I try to remember and tell myself this, no matter how foolish it feels when I see news of the one trillionth shooting or hate crime, or more evidence of the climate changing for the worse.

I don't have any solutions to these problems that I mentioned. I don't have a feelgood ending planned for this post. I'm just doing what I've done since I was a child: write. If I can't make something right, I write something, in some feeble hope it can change the future, like writings of the past have changed me. I know change doesn't come overnight; change requires consistency and self-sacrifice. At the opposite end of every push for change is a villain that refuses change, that wants things to stay the same, if not worse. This is how people succumb to their demons or addictions--or how planets die.

I guess the only positive thing I can say is: don't ever change your desire for change. Don't give up, no matter how silly it feels, no matter how small the resistance is.

We are all time travelers, like Crono. We're traveling forward in time every second of every day, living on a giant spinning rock circling a ball of hot plasma.

And we can always change the future...unless we refuse to.

P.S. Play Chrono Trigger, loser.