Do you have enough provisions in your home to live without assistance for SIXTY DAYS?
EEUU de la opulencia al suplicio (The U.S. from Opulence to Torment) is a book of prophecies printed in Colombia,
self-published by Jairo Hernando Rojas Galvis (which is obvious given the
occasional typo, even to someone like me who speaks Spanish as a second
language.) The introduction, foreword,
and first few chapters mostly speak about the author’s encounters with
shamanism and extraordinary spiritual journeys.
The author encounters a Master (Maestro) during his spiritual journey,
who takes him to a crystalline library where diamond shelves hold multitudes
of volumes over everything that’s ever happened in the universe. The Master takes a
book off a shelf, pages through the volume, and talks about what life on Earth
has really been about, how prophecies affect the future, and the rest of the
book is about the U.S. in prophecies from 1998 to 2048.
My main interest in this book is in the first insurmountable disaster to happen to
the U.S., a devastating and deadly blizzard that engulfs the land so hard,
with snow up to the rafters, that all travel activity in wide areas of the U.S. is grounded completely. The author
moves in spirit form from the crystal library to the new scene of the disaster. It’s actually a rather poetic text, and I have
taken few liberties with the translation:
From Chapter Five: “The Portals, Locks, and Dikes Are
Breaking”
From one moment to the next, all that great, majestic and brilliant
building disappears before me, remaining trapped in a great tunnel where I move,
at great velocity, converting myself into a sudden projectile.
I see everything is revolving, around me. Sharply, that image disappears, finding me
located in a house, located in what seems to be a large town. From the beginning, my attitude is of
bewilderment and astonishment. I make
the effort to order my thoughts, trying to familiarize myself with the images
that I see all around. I observe,
through the windows, that winter has been impressively rough. The sky is gray and the air feels heavy. The snow is falling on the rooftops, the
streets and the fields. Later, it crystalizes,
turning slippery. And, as if I had been
aware, all this time, of the grave situation, I know that the people don’t want
to leave from their homes. The heating
units don’t stand up to the density of the air.
I find myself inside the house, with four more people that, I suppose,
form the family group. They look
anguished, through the blurry windows, at what is happening outside.
Their fearful faces reflect an indescribable fear, before
the approach of an imminent tragedy.
Every once in a while, they lift their gazes toward the
ceiling, since this creaks from the unsustainable weight of the snow.
And they don’t dare to leave. In the streets, the situation is much more
critical. It appears to be a ghost town,
whipped by a strange blizzard, that howls pitifully, with those howls loaded
with deep, poignant omens.
Food gets scarce. It’s
necessary to bear, during sixty long days, the pitiful circumstances that have
extended, in an inclement way, to several states in the south of the
country. There’s no transport, because
to leave represents a risk, even more, when vehicles can’t move, since many
find themselves trapped below the snow.
This phenomenon had been seen, year after year, but never so intensely. Neither had anyone paid attention (to it),
thinking that, with the passage of the years, the situation would improve.
There’s no air traffic.
Airports are found closed, interrupting, thus, the transport of
passengers between cities, same as the exchanges of food.
They say that there are lots of bodies of homeless people,
scattered through the streets, that sleep the deep dream of death, hidden under
the great banks of snow, that reach up to three and four meters of height
(10-13 feet).
One cannot see dogs, nor cats, walking around the white
streets. Pipes are stuck. Water for domestic use is found frozen. Radio and television signals are seen
permanently interrupted. Panic and anxiety
have gone invading, slowly, the terrorized inhabitants. Facing the threat of a famine and facing the
great decrease of food reserves, the supermarkets have been seen sacked.
Many of those who left their houses have not returned. The
insurmountable harassing difficulties presented by the weather, have made death
surprise them on the road. Not even crawling is it easy to travel. The air appears to freeze, even in the
smallest corner of the lungs. For the
body, it’s difficult to maintain normal temperature, and contact with the snow
produces burns.
One cannot see the least hope for a change in the
situation. Pretty well, forecasts are
discouraging, considering that they tend to prolong themselves for a length of
time still undefined.
Around me, I only see four twitching faces that preferably
fall silent, in order to not let escape their countless phrases of regrets.
I stay in the corner of the small living room observing
them, finding myself conscious of the fact that I am an entity far away from
them, at the precise instant of the living events.
The father, a robust man of fifty years, short on hair and
eyebrows, walks from one side to the other, trying to maintain the temperature
of his body and, at the same time, hide his restlessness. He has on his mind a dominant thought that shakes
him over and over again. He wants to
leave in search of food. He heats the palms
of his hands with his breath, time and again. Later he tells the others that he
wants to leave at all cost. His son, his
daughter, and his wife beg him, by means of poignant tears, that he not do
it. And they remind him that, at each
moment, is repeated in the bulletins: “Don’t leave, because the people who have
disappeared are uncountable.”
He turns to the pantry, opens it and, sadly, it shows its
empty interior. Rations have been
exhausted, despite, in the latter days, they used a can to distribute between the four (one can for four people). And this situation is generalized for the majority of the
families.
A bulletin informs that hospitals are living in a critical
situation. People sick with pneumonia, the cold, and starvation have been going up in a disproportional way. Personnel to attend them are very scarce and, at the same time, the reserves of food and medications are
approaching their end.
The greater reality is that the government has been seen impotent
to be able to send aid to different states, since the atmospheric conditions
don’t allow the flight of airplanes or helicopters.
The block is total.
Here, in this home, the situation is desperate. The father busily seeks the way to convince
the family that he should go out in search of provisions. His son, a young man of some 19 years, offers
to leave with him, so that it can happen.
The mother begs that they can still last a few more days,
with the hope that, from one moment to the next, the situation will
improve. He responds that, if the
opposite occurs, the four would be in grave danger of dying.
The roof of the house keeps creaking, menacingly.
After a short discussion between them all, father and son
decide to go in search of food, knowing, before hand, that all that is no more
than a risky adventure, where they are putting the existence of the two in
danger.
There is only one site they can leave from and it’s a narrow
window that is found located under the stairs that go up to the second
floor. As soon as they open it, a frozen
wind begins to enter, brusquely beating against their faces.
The main door is completely stuck by the snow, that covers
it more than three quarters of its height.
The two women embrace, getting confused in the middle of a
touching sob, as if, inside them, throbbed the bleak omen that they would not
see them again.
After going through the window, due to the narrowness, the
father gets caught by it, initiating a distressing struggle where everyone
helped him, pushing him by his legs until, finally, he‘s face down on top of
the inclement snow. Later, the son
passes through with light difficulty, blizzard whipping in his face, with
overflowing fury.
They close the window forcefully, stopping, inside, the
whistling of the wind. Some small mounds
of snow stay stuck to the frame.
Through the tarnished windowpanes, they watch them getting
further away, panting, through the snow, like two ghostly figures that go
fading away heavily, after a white, dense mist.
I decide to leave behind them, because I don’t have the
inconvenience given to material forms to move around, although I feel the mild
influence of the elements of nature.
On the road is found, every great once in a while, a
passerby transformed in a vertical snow man, animated with slow movements like
that of a polar bear.
Half-hidden, under level mounds, parts of extremities are
peeking out, rigid and cold, like an iceberg of ice.
I continue behind them, like an inseparable shadow.
They roam, like a boat adrift, looking for some store. They only find broken windows and empty
shelves. Many flammable objects have
served to light some bonfire, on a corner, and thus to heat up the body of the
beggars and those who still had not been able to return to their homes.
Cars are seen under the snow, like laconic monuments, the
ones that, for a short while, were an effective mode of transport.
While Peter is walking – I heard that name from the lips of
his wife – he remembers the days when he would work as the driver of a
forklift. The business is found inactive
and the forklifts stayed stacked
up, like a mountain of scrap.
In his fifty years, he never saw anything like it. And he had not been without work. His two children couldn’t return to studies.
Everything is found paralyzed, save for a few scarce activities that, hardly, can
stand up, under rigorous sacrifices.
Through their minds, the darkest thought didn’t pour about
being part of these bitter circumstances.
They had been used to seeing everything, like passing facts, like the
average of the majority had seen them, too.
In the brutal winters, there had always been abundant machinery to clear
off the highways.
The runways of the airports were always kept clear. The
supermarkets had sufficient supply. Gas
wasn’t lacking and heaters, bad or good, always worked. Now, things had changed. Survival hasn’t been easy. They are very few who haven’t experienced a
hidden fear facing the grave situation.
Peter and his son walk embracing each other, to give
themselves mutual heat. In the meantime,
they observe that their breathing is made more and more difficult, and in their
thoracic cavity, they feel like their lungs are trying to explode. Their nostrils, upon contacting the air, give
the sensation of
being rummaged around by a burning blight.
The visibility, in certain moments, becomes almost nil. Without being night time, a tenuous darkness
invades the streets like a sinister shadow.
They haven’t managed to find anything.
The act of walking under these painful conditions has subtracted
the little energy they still had from them.
His son, due to his youth, walks on, not without feeling a certain
discouragement that goes up, like an icy snake, through his legs.
They have wandered during several hours, fruitlessly. They say that, until they don’t find
anything, they won’t return home.
But the hands on the clock keep marking the minutes, and
these seem eternal. Being interminable,
they have become hours that shake their fatigued bodies.
The majority of cities of some states in the south,
especially the small cities, live in similar situations. It’s like if the forces of nature had been
conjured, in order to cover, with their extensive arms, these regions. Man has seen himself incapable of fighting,
observing that his distressed efforts haven’t been spent to be unsuccessful.
The night’s shadows have extended their wings, like a
gigantic antediluvian monster, that sharply shakes the air, with the rise and
fall of its vigorous wings.
One way or another, also for Peter and his son, everything
has turned dark and quiet as a tomb, after several worthless hours of walking.
Conquered by fatigue and cold, lying down against each other, they allow
themselves to collapse under the threshold of a door of a sacked store.
They woke up, amid regrets, in a large room of a
hospital. The majority of the
hospitalized people cry out, in screams, for their family members. They don’t let them leave because conditions
don’t allow them to and they would be exposed to a certain death.
Meanwhile, the wife of Peter and their daughter, after three
days of waiting, try to leave, in a useless search. All of a sudden, everything is confusion. The two women die smashed by the roof of the
house, that yielded to the weight of its load.
They weren’t the only ones that endured this tragedy. Uncountable households remained buried under
the snow.
Several days have passed.
The snow melts and, with unused force, in the middle of a fierce
bellow, overflows impressively, supported by unexpected storms. The houses appear to be small boats that float,
sliding, impetuously, over the surface of the earth. Human remains are dragged, by the violent
vortex, showing on their faces the indecipherable grimace of anguish. Household appliances are part of the fury of
the flow.
Peter is left with only his son and his pain. He has lost everything he fought for in his
life: his family, his household, and the vehicle that, in other times, served
him as efficient transport.
At the site where his house had been, they found only sticks
where it had stood. Not a sign of his
wife or daughter.
Across various states, only desolation is seen, mud and
vestiges of what there was once upon a time.
Unburied bodies and the smell of orphanhood. Even then, the survivors don’t recover from
their anguish, of the ire and the desperation.
The help of the government converts itself into alms that
remind them, with nostalgia, of moments of ephemeral happiness.
There was no dam or sluice that would stop the rumbling
passage of the water, in its unforgivable eagerness to destroy.
The drowned cries, in gargantuan tears, are happening
everywhere, driven by the howling of the wind.
The victims are countless, the same with the economic
losses, being considered this episode one of the greatest national tragedies.
