The town had stood for 200 long years.

200 years of storms, of young boys being sent off to war in distant towns.

It stood proudly through civil war and floods and fires.

While 200 was a blink of the eye in the history of the human race,

the town stood as a testament of resilience of the working class,

refusing to give up and turn to the cities in times of crisis.

Whether it would survive another 20 was not taken for granted.

The storms had eroded the storm walls.

The state had stopped investing in those walls,

claiming the seas rising would come back down,

despite no evidence to suggest so,

and what remained was sparse.

Like everywhere, climate change had scarred the town, destroying access to parts of town and washing homes out to the sea. The past few years, however, had been particularly bad.

As the federal government focused on consolidating power in the cities, small villages like this had been particularly bad. As the federal government focused on consolidating power in the cities,

small villages like this had been left to face the brunt of the ecological costs of capitalism.

What little energy focused towards climate change had been pushed to the side,

the concern of the state was with the present, not the future.

The state was trying to keep the country from slipping further out of their grasp.

Short-term survival was the only option. Without state support, the

overwhelming responses on most small towns was through professional organized groups

that had spun off bureaucratic mega NGOs like the Red Cross and from mutual aid groups,

most of which were woefully short in resources. Those folks started in the

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