Please note: The post-apocalyptic fiction section has been moved to current events

The headline above is borrowed from a notice posted on a bookstore window in San Anselmo, California.

More than a few news programs in the media recently sparkled with airbrushed images of despicable political louts facing serious legal trouble, followed by celebrity breakups and how to get those washboard abs in 30 seconds or less, monetizing our most furious extremes in 15-second sound bites available to all: hurricanes, blizzards, and mass murders by middle school children burning with rage.

We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational now, seesawing between effervescent “likes” and vicious confrontations stoked by fear.

For some, this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others, it is the opening chapters of a brutal book with a savage ending.

To me, what is most distressing with this book is the zeal with which the angry denialists applaud the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that the human species has the inalienable right to take anything it wants from nature, whether it be mountaintops, wetlands or oil.

This ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna and drowning the land in pesticides may have already brought us to a place where no technology can save us — yet somehow, bedrock values and longings persist in thought-provoking books published every day to great acclaim and praise. We still have tender feelings for such notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, and equitable sharing.

We still cling to hope that the book of our life will have a happy ending. We still believe we can save ourselves and our damaged earth simply because there is no alternative, but there is hope.

The book’s happy ending still holds out a hand to us. It is in the hope of grasping that hand that we lift our heads towards the indispensable silver lining that makes it all worthwhile: lovers reunited, families reconciled, doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, good names restored, greed daunted, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, charlatans tossed down the stairs, orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed, and the sound of distant neighbors across the valley dancing with merriment and celebration under a band of milky stars and a silvery moon.

And, they all lived happily forever after.