Cherish Book
A Brief Synopsis
“Cherish” is a different kind of war story. Instead of describing the chaos and destruction inflicted by blowing things up, it centers on what happens when everything shuts down. The setting is a college town in rural Iowa as it adapts to a cyberwar where a massive national and global power outage paralyzes supply chains, communications, transportation, food production and other components of modernity. It focuses on the intimate dynamics of a challenging but essential transition from privatized lives to collective resilience and renewal.
Faced with the sudden shutdown of the highly centralized systems that have provided convenience and apparent security but weakened our hands-on knowledge of how to function when those systems go down, we are thrown back on each other to make it through. We often discover the best side of ourselves when we’re forced to turn to one another rather than depend on vast, unaccountable institutions. In the process, we discover how much we need each other and learn to appreciate what each of us brings to the whole. “Cherish” is a human-scale drama of breakdown, breakthrough and rebirth from our roots, with all the emotional struggle and intimate openings such transformations entail.
The war begins when adversaries in both superpower blocs paralyze each other’s critical services in continuous cyber strikes on prime military, technology and urban targets. Designed to disable rather than devastate, this kind of attack disconnects the fragile infrastructures of centralized modernity. The locales that function most effectively in such circumstances are those that have already created the components of resilience, self-reliance and mutual aid that enable them to come to the aid of one another in the absence of help from the outside.
The novel focuses on how well-prepared communities and neighborhoods adapt and learn to work together in modes of cooperation that have atrophied in more ordinary times. But it also describes the more chaotic, destructive behavior of individuals, gangs, and repressive upper echelons of power alarmed by the breakdown of centralized power. And it dramatizes how better organized communities respond to these attacks on their independence and growing connections with other resilient communities around the country and world.
This is an emotionally and spiritually complex portrayal of the best and worst aspects of human behavior under extreme duress. Such emergencies often do bring out the best in us in ways that in retrospect surprise us. We demonstrate more solidarity and self-sacrifice in emergencies than we do in years of ordinary life. Cyberattacks won’t last forever, but in their limited duration they test our mettle by forcing us to realize that like it or not, we belong together. We either survive and thrive together or we die alone in isolation and terror.
More than their urban neighbors, long-settled rural residents usually grow up with customs and values of self-reliance and mutual aid that are indispensable when rescue from the outside is, no longer available. Obliged to meet basic needs themselves, they largely set aside their
divergent politics and cultures and roll up their sleeves, designing practical solutions to the myriad challenges they face. Thrust into a crucible of cooperation, their attitudes gradually shift from mutual suspicion to grudging but mutual appreciation. For some, adversity breeds solidarity, a sense of belonging and common purpose. There is even room here for moments of levity, humor and tenderness whose surprising presence adds to the emotional range of the novel. Part of what enables communities to survive and thrive in adversity is their heightened capacity to laugh, love and rediscover joy in the midst of their shared struggles.
Some men see things as they are and ask, “Why?”
I dream things that never were and ask, “Why Not?”
George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah