Playwright: Camila Le-Bert
2079
The inspiration for this play is a mix of utter despair and anxiety on the subject of climate change, the abysmal pain of losing of many loved ones last year and the hope brought about by the O18 social uprising in Chile, when “Chile despertó”, Chile awakened, and we found a collective struggle and unity calling for a change of everything.
When I was a kid, I was a member of the Junior World Wildlife Fund.
Every month I’d get a magazine with a little black and white bear and some monkeys, a dolphin, a cheetah. I always liked cheetahs.
I was never a girl scout but I had my little black and white bear badge and I felt like I had a duty to protect the planet. A lone ranger. If I saw someone throwing
a piece of garbage on the floor I would yell: LITTER!
LITTER!
It was like a capital sin. I guess. I wasn’t really raised in the church. My family was more along the lines of non-practicing Marxists if you really get down to it.
LITTER!
But I imagine that’s how religious people feel about sin. Going against the divine. LITTER!
You’re killing the whales!
The cheetahs! The little black and white bears!
I would run to pick up the trash and hold on to it until I found a garbage can and my mission was accomplished. I threw out my grandma’s cigarettes too. My kid mind could not understand how someone could purposefully kill themselves every day. She wanted to kill me. I think she wanted to strangle her little gringa granddaughter for being so fucking Mcgruff. I had been brainwashed by the empire, she
must have thought. But cigarettes were the least of her problems, she had survived the fight for a fair world and the violent backlash of the elite and its military minions, exile, the destruction of her country and her dreams and now that I’m older I see the lure of a
little death. Life is exhausting.
My grandfather died last year at 97.
If I lived to be 97, I would have to wait until 2079 to die. 2079.
Chile has the fourth highest suicide rate in the Americas. You know who kills themselves more?
Men over seventy.
Death is everywhere.
You know what pension the state gives you in Chile?
158,339 pesos a month. 223 dollars and 96 cents. A month.
That’s what you get when you have no savings.
Like me. Like most of my friends.
I don’t want to make it to 2079.
I’ve been to the cemetery so much, I have a regular spot in the parking lot.
Not a lot in the graveyard.
I don’t own anything.
I always wanted my own apartment but I’ve been living as an allegada since 2018. Allegada is what we call people in Chile that live in someone else’s house because they either can’t afford their own place or a catastrophe has taken their house. An earthquake, a tsunami, a fire, a mudslide. We have a lot of allegados. A lot of people crammed together. And a lot of natural disasters. We are also the birthplace of neoliberalism AKA capitalism that respects no one and no thing. They sold everything: schools, water, gas, the phone company, the roads. You can’t walk a block around your house in Chile without someone charging you for something. They also call it entrepreneurship.
We faked it so long we actually thought we made it. Now we’re going to bury neoliberalism.
We are leaving our little apartments and we are taking back the streets.
These are our roads. This is our water. And this is our air.
And it isn’t woo. I am not a hippie. And it is not impossible.
We can share. We can stop pretending we are going to be one of them because we’re not.
We are all one paycheck away.
I’ll meet you halfway. There are other ways to do things. We just proved it!
And we’ll find García Lorca in the watermelons. And we will do more than just survive. And we won’t believe the lies because we will know better, we, dare I say it, will have class consciousness and
we will tell them to trickle down their own economics.
We won’t have to break our souls smiling for a tip.
You won’t have to wait for me to be good, because we won’t depend on charity or crowdfunding support to pay for life-threatening surgery because we will all take care of each other.
We don’t want things back to normal.
My friends can make a difference. Take back the internet. Copy or die. Free the pdfs.
I got you.
It wasn’t depression it was capitalism.
Huddled masses, broken bones, making herstory.
For all of those who came before me, we can do it.
Things change.
I don’t regret throwing out Nena’s cigarettes.
It’s been a while since I saw someone throw garbage on the ground. Litter bugs are going extinct.
And the white and black bears are still around.
Let’s check out 2079.
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END OF PLAY
Capitalism views the human population as litter: trash that is left lying in an open or public place. We are disposable to the 1%. They do not care about our well being, they don’t even care if we exist except when it is for their own personal gain. Capitalism makes people vulnerable and exposed. Takes away housing, food, clean air and water, and freedom to do as we please. It takes us as modern day slaves like litter is taken by the wind. We are not given a choice. We are thrown around and toyed with for profit by individuals. These individuals are causing the most litter. In order to execute capitalism properly, for some corporations you need a means of quickly producing your products in large quantities, which in turn creates a massive amount of pollution and waste. Companies promote use of fossil fuels or deforestation to stay afloat. Transportation of goods, people, etc. is harmful to the environment. The list goes on.
We can stop this.