So much has changed since I began this project in 2001. We are not there yet, but this text from Omar El Akkad's American War (2017), offers one possibility for the future of "refugee blankets." They figure prominently in his description of the inside of a refugee tent during the imagined "Second American Civil War (2074-2080)":
"Everywhere in the tent there were piles of accumulated things--hot plates, standing fans, two mini-fridges, half-empty bottles of rubbing alcohol; moisturizer; paperwork from the camp and from the Free Southern State; can openers; first-aid kits; and, more than all of these things, blankets.
Blankets saturated every aid shipment to Camp Patience, boxes upon boxes of burly fabric that scraped the skin like sandpaper. Even in the deadest of winter there was no need for blankets, so instead the refugees fashioned from them room dividers and tablecloths, foot mats and drawer-lining. Still, there were more blankets than anyone knew what to do with. Folded piles of blankets lay beneath the twins' beds and above the filing cabinet. They were useless as bartering currency, subject to an inflation even worse than that of the Southern dollar. And yet the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China and the Bouazizi Empire kept sending more. For the life of her, Martina could not imagine what the foreigners thought the weather was like in the Red, but then she couldn't even imagine the benefactors as people. They existed in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in some vast, indecipherable machine, its only visible output these hulking aid ships full of blankets." (Toronto: Emblem, McClelland & Stewart, pages 97-98).