Written By Brad Harness
After dinner, I sat alone in my big armchair by the fireplace. The flames were licking upwards. Every now and then a Snap! followed by sparks and a Pop! reminded me that life goes on.
I guess it does. We are all placed here on this rock, this giant rock, in orbit around the sun.
That sun has been burning brightly for billions and billions of years. Our planet has been here for about a third of that time, doing its own thing as it evolved eventually into a place suitable for life...a very recent, intelligent form of life.
I watched the flames. It was mesmerizing. The heat was palpable, and calmness settled into my soul. I almost drifted off to sleep.
But I didn’t. I kept thinking about my conversation with my grandson Georgie. We had covered a lot of historical ground, and now the boy was better prepared for his test at school tomorrow.
Snap! Pop!! went the flames as one of the logs - charred through in the centre - broke in two and fell into the flames and charcoal below.
I leaned in and carefully placed a new split log on top, at an angle, and the process of destruction by fire began anew.
This - this here right now - reminded me of the march of human history, through thousands of years.
I recalled that my great-great-grandfather Lourenco had come to Canada from the Basque region. That city, Bilbao, was ground zero in anthropology. That is where the highest concentration of Neanderthal DNA resides today. There, in the western end of the Pyrenees Mountains which separate France and Spain. Why there, experts ask?
Seems that the spread of Homo Sapiens from Africa over hundreds of thousands of years - spilling northeast into Asia and northwest into the Middle East and Europe - boxed in primitive humans. Rising in numbers, they interbred with Neandertals over the generations until descendants like me were left.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, the spreading out, the interbreeding and interconnecting of peoples and ideas, maybe those were the way to guarantee a peaceful future for mankind.
Just like the Terran Federation, which has spread far and wide to embrace and unify humanity.
Resistance may indeed be futile - we will all be assimilated into the greater future for Mankind, and that future will be a more peaceful one.
~ THE END ~
