It’s 2026 in the United States, and our government is collaborating with fanatics who want to induce the Rapture. In their minds, initiating the apocalypse will kick-start the entry of the faithful into Heaven, leaving the rest of us to suffer and die in the mess they’ve made. How neat and easy, to abandon ship, a “ship” — Planet Earth and all her children — that they never learned to love.

But for those of us on the receiving side, no part of it will be neat, as more and more of what we love about the world is maimed and taken from us. Our fear of these endings — plural — is immense, but where there’s fear, there is power. We too have the power to end: to end the systems of oppression and violence, extraction and exploitation; to decide we are no longer content to merely keep these evils out of sight and out of mind, or keep them feebly at bay from one election to the next. We know from world history that it takes only 3% of a country’s population participating in an organized general strike to bring a corrupt government to its knees. We have the power to raze the system to the ground and start anew; to burn brightly and let the end of corruption become the beginning of something new.

Let it begin now.