They live in the ruins of the old world, which deteriorates around them as they continue to survive. Literacy dies out; knowledge is lost. In the final portion of the book (titled “The Last American”), Ish has few lucid moments; those survivors and their children live in a world governed by superstition. The world Ish was born into – whose relics rust around them - is gone.
It’s on p. 344-345 that we find Ish dying, looking upon the rusting vestiges of his world and the humans born into the new world after the "Great Disaster":
He rested there quietly then, as if he had done all in this that he needed to do, and had made his peace. He was dying on the bridge, and he knew it now. Many other, he remembered, had died on that bride. He might have died there many years before in some mere crash of automobiles. Now he had lived clear out of his own world, and still he was dying there.
One way or another, he was now contented. He half-remembered a line which he had read in some book at some time during all those years when he had read so many book. “Men go and come…” But that was trite and meaningless without its other half.
He looked now at the others, although there was a little mist before his eyes and he could not see very well. Yet he noticed the two dogs lying quietly, and the four young men- three of them apart from the other one now – who squatted on the bridge in a half circle around him, watching.
They were very young in age, at least by comparison with him, and in the cycle of mankind there were many thousands of years young than he. He was the last of the old; they were the first of the new. But whether the new would follow the course which the old had followed, that he did not know, and now at last he was almost certain that he did not even desire that the cycle should be repeated.
He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization – of slavery and conquest and war and oppression. But now he looked beyond the young men, toward the bridge itself. Now that he would soon be dead, he felt himself more a companion of the bridge than of the men. It, too, had been part of civilization.
But Ish let his gaze rest upon the little coupe only for a moment. Then his eyes moved higher, and he saw the tall towers and the great cables, still dipping in perfect curves. This part of the bridge seemed to be in a good state of preservation. It would apparently stand for a long time still, perhaps during the lives of many generations of men. The railing, the towers, and the cables – all were rusted red.
But he knew that that rust must be superficial. The tops of the towers, however, were not red, but were shining white with the droppings of generations of seagulls. Yet though the bridge might last still for many years, the rust would eat deeper and deeper. The earthquake would shake the foundations, and then on some stormy day a span would go down. Like the man, so the creation of man would not last forever. …“There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”So few people are willing to admit the disaster that the 1964 Civil Rights Act wrought and what the end result of the Great Migration of Blacks from the south to the north (what we call "Manifest Destruction") represents, that it is the story of Highland Park, Michigan - where Henry Ford built his first assembly line that would in turn revolutionize industry and spur the "American Century" - that we must dub "Detroit Abides"...
Almost 100 percent one hundred years ago, the city was entirely white; today, out of a population of 11,176, the city is 94 percent black.
It's school system -- one hundred percent black according to the Christian Science Monitor - is being sued by the ACLU. The reason?:
Students are suing the state of Michigan and their Detroit-area school district for violating their “right to read.”
The class-action lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, and potentially signals a new wave of civil rights litigation in the United States to enforce laws intended to boost academic achievement, education law experts say.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed what it has dubbed the “right to read” lawsuit on behalf of the nearly 1,000 students in the impoverished district.
Two-thirds of 4th-graders and three-quarters of 7th-graders in the Highland Park school district are not proficient on state reading tests; 90 percent of 12th-graders fail the reading portion of the final state test administered in high school, according to the complaint. Nearly 100 percent of the district’s students are African-American.
“A child who cannot read will be disenfranchised in our society and economy for a lifetime,” said ACLU of Michigan executive director Kary Moss in a written statement explaining the case. The lawsuit follows a “careful process of investigation that has made clear that none of those [education officials] charged with the care of these children … have done their jobs.”What do the good folks at CNN, a channel that turns out more sequels to its Black in America franchise then Hollywood does to Paranormal Activity? How about this:
A few weeks before school began here, parents filed into the high school cafeteria to meet the people just hired to revamp one of the state's worst-performing districts: their own.
They came with questions. What time would the school day start? What were these new uniforms they’d heard about? Would all the schools stay open? Would the same teachers be there? The same kids? Was there anything worth saving?
For years, financial and academic turmoil plagued Highland Park schools. The state of Michigan says the district ran at an operating deficit five of the last six years. Barely 800 kids still attended its three schools, and even those buildings were overgrown with weeds and tagged with graffiti.
There was a lot of cash coming in, more than $14,000 per student, but there weren’t enough textbooks to go around. Standardized test scores were embarrassingly low; among 11th-graders, 10% scored proficient in reading and 5% proficient in math. Some kids went on to college, but nobody – 0% – of kids reached the ACT's college readiness benchmarks.
The district drew national attention this summer when the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed a "first-of-its-kind" lawsuit against the state, education leaders and Highland Park schools for allegedly failing to teach students to read at grade level.
Now the state-appointed emergency financial manager had handed the district over to a charter school operator, the Leona Group, for a five-year contract worth more than $750,000. In a statement, the Michigan governor’s office said it moved to address “a long overdue fiscal and academic crisis that was crippling the district” because it “can’t and won’t accept academic failure.”George Stewart was a leftist, whose "Ish" character in Earth Abides laments all that is necessary to build and sustain a civilization.
Our society - governed by what we have dubbed Black-Run America (BRA) - currently promotes only individuals who have an outlook and philosophy on life like "Ish," ensuring that barbarism is the future for this nation's formerly great cities.
Highland Park, once home to innovation and ingenuity that helped propel this nation forward, is now home to misery and incompetence.
[90 percent black] Detroit Abides...
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