Sacrifice

Years into the future, archaeologists were investigating a culture very much like ours, in a place very similar to ours. Ours, you see, was long gone, having eliminated itself in some way I could not even speculate on; surely you can think of some possibilities. Let’s just say, the world basically had to start over, and when they got around to digging into who we were and what we did, they had to make conclusions based on what they found.

They concluded that we were a sacrificial culture; that, at random times, we would simply kill people randomly as part of our system. They found evidence of random mass killings in schools, malls, country music concerts, all over the place. They were mystified by the pattern; apparently this would happen regularly, but not in any set pattern, so that they couldn’t figure out if it was meant to happen once a day, once every two days, or what. Geographically, it didn’t make a set pattern, except that the killings all happened in what we know as the borders of the USA, and didn’t seem to happen much outside of that.

So, the best they could figure, within the USA, people would get randomly killed in mass shootings, about once a day, or perhaps even more than that, and then the press would converge on the area and it would be in the news for several days. They basically lost all the news clips, and so were unable to figure out what the news said about the killings, but they found evidence that the news vans, the reporters, etc. would be all over the site for days afterward, doing investigations or doing whatever news was supposed to do. From this they surmised that perhaps people didn’t know which place would be next, and would all be very curious about who would be chosen “next.” It was an odd coincidence that, while most books and movies like “Hunger Games” had not survived into this future, a single copy of the story “The Lottery” had survived, and someone was able to translate it, so there was a general assumption that our culture had sacrifices, had approved of they system in whatever form it was in, and just went on living its daily life knowing that, at any time, we could be next.

As it happened, there was considerable discussion about our motives, much more than, say, how we argue about why the Mayans, the Incas and other earlier societies might have practiced sacrifice. With the earlier societies, people, including us, had concluded that it was the practice of religion that led them to do this, with “this” meaning pushing someone into a volcano, or leading a kid up into the mountains, crushing her skull, and burying her there with a cache of gold and silver. The inevitable questions of why they would do this, or how had people let this state of affairs carry on, could never really be answered, because written forms of communication were lost, as was any memory of the events themselves. But the same sense existed of the present culture looking back at the ancient one, and wondering, how could people be so barbaric, or do this to innocent children?

In the case of the future society looking back at ours, there was really the same sense of wonder. They were ultimately able to figure out various details. They figured out that the victims were indeed random, and didn’t know what was about to befall them. They figured out that the instruments of murder were quite common and easily found all throughout the country. They figured out that our culture had various tracking devices for all kinds of instruments, from airplanes to trains and cars, but didn’t apparently use tracking to figure out where these murders would happen or when. From that they inferred that the murderers were given free reign to choose their victims randomly without fear of being tracked or having someone warn the victims before it was too late. From this they concluded that these murders, too, were a form of sacrifice, and, being religious, were able to happen outside of the normal confines of common sense. When they found the TSA screening apparatus at airports they were sure that the culture could do anything it wanted to prevent armaments from being in any particular place, but had clearly done nothing to prevent these random shooters from opening up on a group of innocent victims; it had to be religious.

There was one archaeologist who argued that the killings were random, and people respected him, as he knew quite a bit about the culture we today call ours. Most other archaeologists believed that it was an organized system, intended to appear random, and intended to kill a fair number of people regularly. Evidence pointed to the fact that there were mass killings weekly, increasing to daily, for a long period of time, with no clear geographical pattern outside of the fact that they were all inside what they determined to be the USA, with a miniature outside argument about the ones that happened in Canada. This one scientist argued that they were simply random, carried out by people who had access to the weapons but who had simply lost their grip on reality. His theory was discounted because that scenario was so unlikely in the world they lived in. People simply didn’t lose their grip on reality, and, it was ridiculous to think that anyone would have access to such destructive weapons.

Still, the people who argued that it was religion had some explaining to do. How could a religion sanctify the killing of innocent children, in large number and randomly? What kind of God would it be that justified this kind of killing, and allowed people to create a system whereby every innocent person lives in terror of the inevitable next event?

All arguments went back to the story The Lottery, because that’s really all they had. Religion is not mentioned in this story, said our friend the scientist, but his detractors argued that it didn’t have to be. They had a system; the main character died tragically at the hand of others; nobody knew who was next until it happened. People were forced to collect at a central meeting place where they would find out who would be next, and everyone was aware that it could be them, that it was just a matter of chance. People read and reread this story because they had to have a way of fitting this reality into their consciousness, and teaching their children how the system worked. It was the system, as it was set up, and that’s how life was lived.

Ultimately the archaeological community concluded that the guns themselves were religious icons, which was why they were allowed to proliferate even as such things as airplanes, cars, and drones were strictly controlled. Of course, looking at the big picture, they were quick to admit that, as with the Incas and Mayas, they didn’t really know that much about the religion of a culture outside of the evidence that they could find and be sure of. So, while both we and the early indigenous cultures of the Americas were all considered primitive, with sacrifice embedded in our religions, they still were able to find ways that our understanding of our world was quite advanced, and they admired the temples we had made to our gods and our religion. I can’t show you how our scientist, who had it right, ultimately won the day, because, ultimately, he didn’t, though he died believing he was right. Schoolchildren for generations, studying our culture as one of the ancient ones, wondered what it would be like to live in a world where, any minute, somebody could walk in with a religious icon, and simply shoot everyone. They wondered how anyone could possibly learn anything, under these circumstances, and assumed that we had trouble with the process. And unfortunately, there was none of us around to tell them what it was like.