Poem: "Everything Turned Upside Down"
Jul. 24th, 2021 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis poem is spillover from the July 6, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from ng_moonmoth and Anonymous. It has been sponsored by ng_moonmoth. This poem belongs to the Daughters of the Apocalypse series.
"Everything Turned Upside Down"
[0 A.E.]
In the way that everything
typically was, the Grunge was
designed for healthy white men.
The noxious vapor sought
them out and targeted them
with unparalleled ferocity,
killing combat-capable people
far more than any other group.
It killed women, too, but
not as many as men.
It killed people of color, too,
but not as many as white people.
It killed the young and the old,
but mostly the middle-aged,
the adults in their prime.
It killed people with disabilities,
but it killed more of the able-bodied,
and those it didn't kill were often
left with whole new handicaps.
It killed the transgendered and
the queer, but mostly it killed
the cisgendered straight people.
The Grunge was so tightly targeted
to credible threats that it changed
the demographics among survivors.
Now men and boys were a minority,
greatly outnumbered by women and girls,
and people of in-between identities had
become a larger percentage of the total.
There were far fewer white people, and
they weren't a majority in many places
anymore, instead jumbled in with
the survivors of many other colors.
And who had time to worry about
that old business, anyway?
People were too busy just
trying to survive in a world
gone mad, where production
had ground to a halt and
scavenging would not
work forever either.
In some areas, children
and teens outnumbered adults,
while in others the numbers
were closer to even but still
hard for the adults to handle.
Like everyone else in the Aftermath,
people with disabilities did what work
they could, and everyone else was
grateful that it had gotten done.
Nobody worried about lesbians
anymore -- with so many women
and so few men, what else were
people supposed to do for company?
Some said that gay men were selfish,
but most felt that men had lost so much
that they deserved whatever comfort
they could find in each other.
Besides, few people felt like
raising babies right now.
It was a world inhabited by
the very old and the very young,
by women and genderqueer people,
by blacks and Hispanics and
folks of mixed backgrounds.
Everything was turned upside down,
but given the way it had been before,
maybe that wasn't a bad thing.
* * *
Notes:
In modern America, the "model human" is a straight white man, that is, in each category a member of the preferred group. This appears everywhere from medical studies to product design. So things designed for straight white men may work less well, or not at all, for many other people. This is deeply entrenched for many complex reasons, and efforts to fix it -- once people finally noticed the problems -- have been slow to make progress. Having been designed exactly the same way as most other things, the Grunge targeted humans more severely the closer they were to the "model human," with higher survival rates in every other category.
In entertainment, the marked case dies first. Examples include Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays. Due to the design of the Grunge, however, the pattern is reversed in this context. The straight white men die in droves, while those who are queer, ethnic, female, etc. had a higher chance of survival. The effects are so dramatic as to cause massive changes in demographics such that the "model human" has become the least common type.
ng_moonmoth and Anonymous. It has been sponsored by ng_moonmoth. This poem belongs to the Daughters of the Apocalypse series."Everything Turned Upside Down"
[0 A.E.]
In the way that everything
typically was, the Grunge was
designed for healthy white men.
The noxious vapor sought
them out and targeted them
with unparalleled ferocity,
killing combat-capable people
far more than any other group.
It killed women, too, but
not as many as men.
It killed people of color, too,
but not as many as white people.
It killed the young and the old,
but mostly the middle-aged,
the adults in their prime.
It killed people with disabilities,
but it killed more of the able-bodied,
and those it didn't kill were often
left with whole new handicaps.
It killed the transgendered and
the queer, but mostly it killed
the cisgendered straight people.
The Grunge was so tightly targeted
to credible threats that it changed
the demographics among survivors.
Now men and boys were a minority,
greatly outnumbered by women and girls,
and people of in-between identities had
become a larger percentage of the total.
There were far fewer white people, and
they weren't a majority in many places
anymore, instead jumbled in with
the survivors of many other colors.
And who had time to worry about
that old business, anyway?
People were too busy just
trying to survive in a world
gone mad, where production
had ground to a halt and
scavenging would not
work forever either.
In some areas, children
and teens outnumbered adults,
while in others the numbers
were closer to even but still
hard for the adults to handle.
Like everyone else in the Aftermath,
people with disabilities did what work
they could, and everyone else was
grateful that it had gotten done.
Nobody worried about lesbians
anymore -- with so many women
and so few men, what else were
people supposed to do for company?
Some said that gay men were selfish,
but most felt that men had lost so much
that they deserved whatever comfort
they could find in each other.
Besides, few people felt like
raising babies right now.
It was a world inhabited by
the very old and the very young,
by women and genderqueer people,
by blacks and Hispanics and
folks of mixed backgrounds.
Everything was turned upside down,
but given the way it had been before,
maybe that wasn't a bad thing.
* * *
Notes:
In modern America, the "model human" is a straight white man, that is, in each category a member of the preferred group. This appears everywhere from medical studies to product design. So things designed for straight white men may work less well, or not at all, for many other people. This is deeply entrenched for many complex reasons, and efforts to fix it -- once people finally noticed the problems -- have been slow to make progress. Having been designed exactly the same way as most other things, the Grunge targeted humans more severely the closer they were to the "model human," with higher survival rates in every other category.
In entertainment, the marked case dies first. Examples include Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays. Due to the design of the Grunge, however, the pattern is reversed in this context. The straight white men die in droves, while those who are queer, ethnic, female, etc. had a higher chance of survival. The effects are so dramatic as to cause massive changes in demographics such that the "model human" has become the least common type.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-24 09:01 pm (UTC)I wonder how the Magical Minority Person trope might play out here.