After and Before

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

The Pacific Circuit, by Alexis Madrigal:

Imagine you are wandering through a Target. What would happen if you could reverse the flow of logistics, play it backward? All the lamps and humidifiers and three hundred varieties of deodorant would get stuffed back into containers, trucked back to distribution centers out in the exurbs of the Bay Area, then sent back down to the port on a truck, and finally loaded back onto a ship, which would cross the ocean to an Asian port, and trucks and trains there would head back to the factories whence they came. Keep going and you’d see the raw materials flying out of the products back to the forests and the underground and the feedlots and the farms and the industrial chemistry facilities and the oil fields. 

The City of Oakland — Local Government’s Post, by whoever accidentally mixed up the before and after photographs so as to make it appear–in an account that has been posting a regular stream of fairly grim photographs of unhoused folks having their possessions thrown away as they are pushed around the city–as if the city saw an empty and unused park and decided that here would be a place to allow human beings to shelter from the storms that modern society has made of their lives, instead of fully making use of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling that “enables local jurisdictions to enforce anti-camping laws and clear encampments without making indoor shelter offers,” which has dramatically accelerated encampment destruction, now that an absence of actual “available shelter” is no impediment to destroying what shelters these human beings have:

Lafayette Square Park in District 3, before and after. Camping is not allowed in City Parks, per the Encampment Management Policy. Residents are offered available shelter and services before any encampment actions are taken.

It took me about 15 minutes of scrolling backwards and backwards to find the very first such post the city of Oakland made, after the new encampments policy; before that post, 40 percent of their posts weren’t celebrations of occupied human spaces cleared of their humanity. That timeline gives away the game: they can say things like “Residents are offered available shelter and services before any encampment actions are taken” but after Grants Pass, that means, of course, that they are offered what shelter and services are available (which is very little), rather than requiring shelter to be available before throwing people’s lives in the trash.