Day 126...and there will come Soft Rains

I'm not really sure where the above quote came from. I remember hearing it or reading it and it always stuck with me. I have a sneaking suspicion it came from a Ray Bradbury story, perhaps the story, "All Summer in a Day." (To hear the story - about 11 minutes long, click on the title).

The story is getting to be pretty darn old. It was published in March of 1954 in the science fiction magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It must have been quite the wild story at the time. A young girl is taken to Venus from Earth where she played in the daily sunshine.  On Venus, the sun only comes out once every few years, so seldom in fact that the children don't remember it. They can't conjure up any idea of what the sun looks like because they have only experienced rain. Only our young heroine does.  When she describes it to her classmates as a bright shiny coin they don't believe her.  The day they are to see the sun they lock her in a closet and forget about her.

It's a story, a sad one, about being different.  It captures the capacity of children to be abusive and their inability to trust something their senses can't confirm. It depicts how that inability to relate and handle something/someone different plays out in their everyday lives.  The following link is a visual depiction of the story. It is about 25 minutes long.  It is a very good adaptation of the story if 

you have the time. 

I remember reading this story, many, many times. I read it to my class. Their reaction was often like the reaction of King David when he heard the story about the wealthy man who stole a sheep, a family pet really, from one of his tenants, and then butchered it for a feast in honor of one of his guests.


Bradbury also wrote a story about a fully automated house. It locked the doors, made breakfast for the family, self-cleaned. But disaster overtook the family and the house kept on following its routine orders until it caught on fire, a soft rain putting out the flames.

Imagine, sixty plus years ago, people were dreaming up stories about living on distant planets in a future they devised.  Yet despite the glitz of how they imagined the future, they also depicted the human condition.

Phillip K. Dick is another one of those science fiction writers.  Dick, from Ft. Morgan, CO wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the novel on which a small part of the movie Blade Runner was based.  Now, a sequel to Blade Runner is coming out, October 6, 2017 which will, purportedly continue the story of Dekkard (Harrison Ford) some thirty years later. Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Jared Leto and Edward James Olmos (who was in the original as Gaff) will also be a part of the film.  What new things will the film show us about the human condition? The trailer has dropped a few hints. 

One of the lines in the movie states that every civilization was build on the back of a disposable workforce. In the movie, it is androids, called replicants.  In the first movie, the manufacturer was experimenting with giving replicants memories so they would walk, talk and act more like humans. If you haven't seen it, try to locate it somewhere - it doesn't matter what version (there are a number of them - original, director's cut and so on).

All of this is a round about way of asking the question have we really learned anything from history or literature? Both are filled with life lessons should we pay heed and dig just a very little deeper. The British and the Chinese built walls to "protect" their civilizations; a decimated Germany regrouped under a dictator, one of the goals to regain their honor as a nation again; Latin American countries go from one despot to the next with nothing really changing.

Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain

Soft rains put out a fire. Today they clean the air, water the grass, cool the air.

Sometimes soft rains are to bring us some joy. Spotting a rainbow, walking in the gentleness, breaking a heat wave.

Sometimes they too can remind us to be gentle, see rainbows, and cool tempers. They aren't meant to leave anyone out (your choice what you want to do with a soft rain); they are meant to rejoice and celebrate the everyday for everyone, whether or not a civilization advances from the efforts of our labor.

Bradbury and Dick got a whole lot of things right in their stories. What will we get right in ours? What future will we paint for current and generations to come. The choice is ours.