At some point before we were born, we may have agreed with the powers that be to live in this time period, with the pros and cons being arguably complex, but most of all agreeing to bear and then act on the knowledge that climate science experts were right from at least 50 years ago to today, and that extinction is the most likely future (ashes), as a FACT. Seeing leaders in 2026 barrel ahead toward the worst, most depressing possible ending with the most possible suffering, nothing at all to hope for. And then as a white person making a choice to know about the history of slavery worldwide (its possible for them to avoid and “not-know” it), and see the threads that make it into the current international fabric of war, fossil fuel with its rape-filled, relentless death, poverty through the microscope, environmental catastrophe, not to mention prisons growing as fat as caterpillars, including throughout starvation, to know that we’re e not on a flotilla with the sacrifice, and cry for the dying history in tents and see the ashes of libraries, museums, temples, cathedrals, monuments, villages, cavernous appetite for erasure by the robot class, that will be 2020, the median point in your years, with the ultimate agreement (so said the fortune teller lady): we agreed to bear it and very likely to also act on it (it looked easier from far away).