“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

I cradle my arm close to my chest. “I don’t care.”

FRAGMENTING FOOD SUPPLIES

• An already fragile food supply chain is forming tears under the weight of plague spread and lockdown restrictions.

• Meat processing plants have been shut down following outbreaks, farmers have been forced to dump milk and destroy potato stockpiles, and transport has come grinding to a halt.

It’s going to be a cold and lonely Christmas.

With hospitals overflowing and death tolls continuing to rise, another challenge is already presenting itself. It’s not connectivity—while phone and internet networks have been straining under the weight of increased traffic, network providers claim they can handle increased demand for the foreseeable future. It’s a far more basic problem: food. Fragile food supply chains are being disrupted across the country due to movement restrictions of food workers, vulnerability in food processing, and missing links in logistics.

“Many stockpiles are going to waste because we simply have no way to process them,” says a spokesperson from the Department of Agriculture. “High mortality rates have caused sourcing issues too. Even in those situations where supply lines function as intended, stores are understaffed and, in many cases, have shut down completely, breaking the chain right before food reaches the consumers.”

A secondary presidential task force has been called into existence to discuss potential solutions for supply problems. In addition to the consequences of the outbreak, food insecurity could cause massive civil unrest. It also goes to show the fragility of the system; if these essential supply chains are breaking down, what will be next?

But even in places where food supply chains are still functioning, Christmas is going to be a solemn affair. Governor Brooks (AR, D) has explicitly called for people to respect lockdown measures during the Christmas period and stay at home instead of traveling or visiting other households. “I expect everyone to understand and respect the severity of the situation,” she says, following an outbreak in Faulkner County that was traced back to a megachurch service.

Hope for Better Futures: A History

By Isaiah Wood

This is not a proper introduction.

Once all of this is over, someone needs to know what happened here. If we’re the ones to tell the story, that would be best, but human memory is fallible. I don’t know when this will end or how long it will take. I don’t know if we can remember all of it.

So I’m writing it down now. All of it. The internet is slow. The phones aren’t working. We thought it may have been Better Futures at first, deciding not to pay the bills. Especially since they haven’t responded to our messages. I can’t get through to anyone. But outages appear to be the case everywhere. Network congestion, according to one of the news sites.

This is the best thing I can do until I find other ways to make myself useful: record who we are and what we’ve done and experienced, for posterity. They call me the Professor. I can act like it.