Planning Purgatory

The Industrial Revolution played havoc on God's civil engineers. Oh sure, Heaven and Hell were always pretty easy to organize. The people in Heaven were always treated like kings only much much better, and Hell was set up to treat its residents like some combination of prisoners and peasants, only worse. That way everyone felt appropriately awarded or punished. Purgatory, post Industrial Revolution, however, was a nightmare. It used to just be luke warm gruel and a typical day in the fields for the poor and for the wealthy a calf that was kind of fatted followed by a jester who had a couple of good jokes, but were all pretty obvious. Differences between men and women, the quality of tavern food, and complaints about work. With the rise of the middle class, and then further, the striation of the upper, middle, and lower classes into their own self contained upper middle and lower classes and the number of purgatories that God's civil engineers had to coordinate became a hydra to slay, for each slice of the population had to have an afterlife carefully blanded to their own life experiences. A hundred tv channels was a perfectly fine purgatory for the lower-middle class, but was practically heaven to the upper-lower. Supermarket beef wellington and chicken cordon bleu for dinner each night was hell for the lower-upper class, heaven for the middle-middle, but perfectly so-so for the upper-middle. Purgatory's designers breathed a sigh of relieve that at least a long work day with stupid co-workers stayed consistent through each level. After carefully constructing the Nine Circles of Purgatory, funding for the afterlife skyrocketed. Too many special orders, too many administrators. “Maybe it would save us money,” the engineers said to God one day after a budget cutting meeting, “if we just re-widened the gap between the rich and everyone else like the good old days.”

- Originally mailed to M.J. Navoy in Picayune, Mississippi