The Great Reversal

It was once said that civilization was measured by how a society treated its waste — both human and moral. The ancients knew it, even before they understood microbes or contagion. Rome, at its peak, could feed millions of souls, all because it mastered the art of clean water and dirty disposal. Aqueducts whispered through hillsides. Sewers beneath the stone veins of cities carried disease away. Sanitation wasn’t charity — it was survival.

But that knowledge is gone now. Not lost — worse. Abandoned.

By the mid-21st century, American cities had entered a kind of Great Reversal. The old rules were no longer enforced — not because they couldn’t be, but because the new elite deemed them oppressive. Laws were called cruel. Order was called injustice. Hygiene was deemed a privilege. So it was undone, slowly at first, then all at once.

No one dared question it.

The city centers once symbols of modernity — Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, New York — had decayed into open-air latrines. Human waste flowed in alleys and seeped into subway grates. Sidewalks were sticky with needles and the residue of synthetic highs. Homeless encampments towered like termite mounds in the shadows of luxury skyscrapers — festering symbols of a system in collapse. Citizens were told to step carefully, to flush only what was approved, to pick up after their dogs. But the streets told a different story.

People no longer noticed the stench. You adapted, or you didn’t last.

Health departments were dismantled or rebranded. Surveillance drones filmed violence and squalor, not to prevent it, but to normalize it. Public urination, defecation, fornication — all forgiven in the name of compassion, though no compassion ever reached the souls it was meant to save.

Tourists vanished. Police withdrew. Public transport became a nocturnal gauntlet, a proving ground of disease and derangement. The subway tunnels hummed not with progress but with the moans of the forgotten.

The knowledge was still there — buried in old textbooks, in the ruins of libraries now turned into shelters. We knew how to build a civilization. But we no longer believed we deserved one.

And so the cities rotted. Not because they had to, but because no one had the will — or the authority — to say no more.

And in the silence, civilization died. Not with bombs or war, but with filth, indifference, and the slow suffocation of standards.