LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

It had been a magnificent coupling in the early hours of the morning. A full moon was shining down on them as they cavorted, naked, on the sand dune to the sound of the waves gently lapping the shore. That was the only sound – that and the forlorn cry of a lone night bird as it flew overhead in the darkness. Their muted cries of ecstasy as they made love merged with the sights and sound of nature. Indeed, their passion was part of nature. As it had been since time immemorial in its pristine form.

It was a scene of natural beauty that had been in existence since humans first walked the earth and which, at this point in time very late in the second millennium, was threatened by extinction forever.

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It had all begun in the third decade of the second millennium when the election of a madman into the Oval Office in America had triggered a major dislocation in a global society already on the edge of disaster.  It was a dislocation that saw a loss of democracy as it had been known to that point in time and global conflict which had only ended when superpower conflict – including catastrophic military conflict – had reached a climax and a dictatorial global governance had descended as the only way of ending chaos and restoring order in a world given over entirely to the free play of market forces and the sterile, shabby, values that accompanied it.

For a long time a shocked global population hadn’t noticed what was happening. It had all happened gradually – and within the structures of a spurious democracy which saw a wealthy managerial elite lording it over frightened and insecure masses held in subservience by a false mendacious establishment that had all the levers of power in its hands. By the time of the moonlight love making that power had been handed irrevocably into the hands of that elite exercising an oligarchic rule by means of a dictatorial tyranny.    

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In the silence of that morning this lovemaking had not been entirely unobserved.  It was 4 am and long after the youthful revelry in a nearby seaside entertainment square had run its course.

A police patrol car moving slowly along the foreshore had spotted it and stopped to investigate. It was the smoke that first caught their attention. It was an offence to release carbon into the atmosphere like that and heavy penalties applied for doing so. It was chilly at that time in the morning and the love makers had improvised a small fire to keep warm just as their aboriginal forebears had done for countless centuries back into the past. 

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The couple were taken to the City Watch House in the city centre and charged with multiple offences. They were held overnight in the Watch House cells and taken before a magistrate the following morning.

In court the prosecutor indicated they were both charged with offences under the Emergency Climate Change Protection Act 2099 (ECPA) for releasing carbon into the atmosphere (the small camp fire), the Human Relations Act 2009 (HRA) (Failure to register their sexual activity as required by law).

They were also charged with public indecency under the Summary Offences Act 2099.

Across the democratic globe there had been a plethora of laws enacted to reshape society as the oligarchies in each country wanted it to be.

In Australia, under the ECPA, a range of draconian offences had been enacted in a desperate attempt to help save the planet. And under the HRA various measures were enacted to better regulate the way the oligarchs thought people should relate to one another. For example, it was mandatory to register your intention to engage in sexual activity, the kind of sexual activity, and the fact that it was consensual between the persons so involved. (Marriage – and its references to love - was now considered anachronistic and by its very nature misogynist and so the Marriage Act had been replaced by the Human Relations Act aimed at regulating all human relations in line with a strict feminist perception of human relations and what they should be. It had been deemed the only realistic way of ridding society of all its doggedly unresolved human relationship aberrations – most notably sexual assault, domestic violence, and other misogynistic behaviour - when it became clear that such behaviour was not responding to harsher penalties under existing law.  The basic premise of this act was that there would be no – or as few as possible - romantic relations in society with all the uncertainty, passion, unpredictability, and violence it carried – especially for women and girls - in favour of arrangements, deals, between human partners without the human weaknesses embedded in love which had plagued society for centuries.

It was a dystopian, pragmatic, approach to human relationships with a maximum of order and a minimum of passion, poetic impulse, spontaneity, and creativity which had, it was deemed, long been the cause of trouble in human relationships.

Apart from the offences under these two acts they were also charged with possession of misogynist literature which was prohibited under the Act. A copy of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four had been found in their possession.

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‘Do you have legal representation?’ The magistrate had an avuncular manner and spoke gently and reassuringly to the two defendants.

No, they did not.

‘In that case I am going to hold your case in the list while you take advice from a duty solicitor. These offences carry custodial penalties and it is in your best interest to be represented on these matters. The sheriffs officer can show you were to go to get that advice.

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‘I’m sorry to say it looks bad for you both, the Legal Aid lawyer advised them.

He was a man of advanced years – in his late 70s – who had learnt what earlier life was like from his parents and grandparents and of the democratic freedoms which existed in earlier decades. Before the ‘big happening’ (that’s what they called it) had started with the election of an unstable sociopath into the American presidency – something which tipped the world first of all into tragically contentious chaos and then global tyranny to get that chaos under control.

‘I personally’, the lawyer said, ‘think these restrictions are an abomination. But I am a lawyer. I believe in the rule of law. This has all come about democratically and I am bound by it – as is his Honour the magistrate – whether we like it or not’.

It is for you to say as my client. But my advice is that your chances of getting off these charges are very slim and that your best bet is to plead guilty to them and seek a lesser penalty on the basis of mitigating circumstances which I will outline.

The couple instructed him to make the guilty plea.

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The two defendants appeared later on the same day before the same magistrate. The legal aid lawyer put the argument for them in mitigation. The fire had been a very small one and the carbon it sent into the atmosphere was negligible, that they were remiss in not completing the paper work required by the HR and promised to make every effort to do so in future, that they did not know the two books were banned and would make every effort not to be in possession of banned books in future. The lawyer also pointed out that their naked love making occurred late at night when no one else was around and so was at the lesser end of the scale of offending. And so on.

The magistrate also pointed out that the laws under which they had been prosecuted had been made by a duly elected democracy in that jurisdiction and that, whatever his – or their – private views were, we were all bound by the law of the land and that he was compelled to sentence them accordingly.

He then went on to impose a prison sentence of 5 years each for all the charges but suspended it on condition they enter a strict good behaviour bond for 2 years. 

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Outside the court the couple gave each other a hug of relief. No prison.

It had been a traumatic, stressful, experience for both of them and they were much relieved. But despite the trauma their passion – their romantic love - for one another was unabated.

They were free to plan their next exotic episode of love making under a summer sky in a secluded place where the heavy hand of the state – the oppressive brave new world of the new millennium - could not interfere.

On the bus on the way home to the seaside he pulled a tattered volume for his inside pocket and read it to his beloved at his side. This is for you, he whispered in her ear, with a defiant gleam in his eye:

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate;

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrim’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’