The Old Man and Tomorrow (Part II)

December 12^th, 2039 – Portland; Oregon – Pacific Northwest States

I suppose it's a good thing; this series.

What the hell; if one of you doesn’t like it, what are you going to do?  Quit reading?  Threaten to come and take away my youth?  Ha!

I never thought I’d live this long. Life was pretty iffy around thirty years ago; there were a couple of times I thought I might starve -   but hell.  I’ve got a garden; there’s still fish in the rivers (secession helped with that, ironically; we declared a 200-mile fishing limit off our coasts, and as a result the salmon are running like they haven’t been since the 1930’s.); I pickle and preserve a lot of things; it comes in handy in the wintertime (ever eat preserved lemons?  They’re good) – turns out my penchant for cooking turned into a survival-hobby of sorts.  I’m better off than most.

But I’m ahead of myself, as usual.  Y’see, a lot of things happened before California defaulted.  Some of them were the province of over thirty years of fiscal mismanagement starting more-or-less clear back during the early 1980s and the Reagan Administration.   Most of the people reading this weren’t alive back then; those who were had to bear the brunt of the consequences.  A lot of them wound up shooting themselves for lack of options; the American suicide-rate spiked in the ‘teens and twenties of this century – but that’s another story entirely.

It wasn’t so much that we’d lost the sense of who we are – it was that we’d lost our sense, entirely.  As a country, we believed we could do anything; in fact, we'd flattered ourselves for decades that we were 'exceptional', and that whatever the bad-things were, they just couldn't happen here

We supported other countries which beat down their own citizens, just as long as those countries supported our worldview – which, if you boiled it all down, said “Fuck you and everyone who looks like you; just keep the oil flowing and gimme my lifestyle.”

Sooner than later, people began to say ‘no’.  We should have taken a huge clue from 9/11.  Instead, we preferred to believe nonsense – it wasn’t our fault; it’s Militant Islam/the gays in America/a huge conspiracy – take your pick.  The stories got more and more outlandish.  No one bothered to say, “Look – there’s a group which took responsibility – all of the evidence points there.  Why did they do this?” 

That would have led to questions like, “What did we do?”   We weren’t thinking that way – not with the trained-chimp we had in office as President at the time, who believed that it was some sort of Holy Crusade to go blow the hell and gone out of the Middle East, rather than do a little self-examination.

As history’s proven, if we’d just listened – and learned from the wake-up call of 3,000+ dead and three demolished buildings – we’d’ve been able to change our policies in the Middle East and avoid what happened later.

But no, we’d elected G.W. Bush the Second – a goat-roper from Texas who couldn’t put two words together in a sentence – but who had the power to send us all to war.

I remember talking to the son of a friend of mine – a neighbor; actually – who came back from a tour in Iraq; he resigned his commission and was living with his parents when he came over along with his Mom and Dad for a party I was holding.  He said, “Imagine doing the worst thing possible in the world – and imagine doing it in Hell.  That’s Iraq.”  That was a few years before the morale issues began to surface; the suicides and mental-health problems of the war veterans – between Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d all but destroyed an entire generation; those who weren’t near-to-crazy from the experience came back mean.

Crime went up.  We finally admitted to the truth and pulled the troops out of Afghanistan in ’14, just before California defaulted; when they came home, they came home crazy.  Crazy and mean.  They shot their relatives; their friends; each other.  They drank; too much, really.  Booze fuels crazy.  We all began to see what the government had done to Generation Y. Of course, by the time the Arab countries started to threaten us with an oil embargo if we didn't stop propping up Israel, there was nothing we could do about it - enlistments had dropped like a rock from all but the reddest of red-state families, and by then we were spread too thin to matter.

Most of Gen-Y didn’t give a twopenny damn about the Government.  They tried voting, but when they finally realized that the government had been bought-and-paid for by moneyed-interests on Wall Street, they gave that up, too.  The few who bothered to vote were old farts like me who remembered how good things really were – and the others, who’d been convinced that the current state of things was somehow an expression of greatness.  Small wonder Romney won in ’12.

The Middle East started coming apart around that time, starting in ’11.  Egypt was the first; Libya hung on for almost a year (Khadafi wasn’t about to give up a good thing); Jordan fell apart that summer;  in early ’12 someone had the balls to walk right up and shoot King Abdullah in the head – like I said; ‘balls’.  He was dead in a hail of gunfire within seconds; an outcome he had to know was coming – but Abdullah was deader’n a doornail before he hit the ground.

Tunisia; Morocco; Kuwait – all the work we’d done to build an empire fell apart within months. 

With Kuwait, the whole oil-game changed.  It boiled down to this:  We’ll keep the oil flowing, and at decent prices, but you’re gonna give up Israel as a client-state.

(I’m still convinced that was what did-in the Obama administration.  He had a slim chance up to that point, but faced with feeding his Wall Street buddies or the pro-Israel lobby, he had to side with Wall Street.   Romney rode a loose coalition of Teabaggers and religious-types to the White House.)

Y'see, that was the era of the Tea Party – an agglomeration of poorly-educated Americans who’d been hornswoggled into believing that government was ‘bad’; that they were overtaxed, and that they needed to give all the rich people tax breaks so they could turn around and hire cooks, housecleaners and drivers.  They called this ‘trickle down economics’ – a term from back in the ’80’s – and it worked about as well as pissing down someone’s neck and telling them it was rain. I know; it sounds crazy now, but that's how things were, back then.

Those of us with a brain in our heads took to calling them Teabaggers (a sexual term; it might still be, I don’t know) – there was a Teabagger who was elected governor in New Jersey; another one in Wisconsin; the House of Representatives back in Washington was full of Teabaggers; when they won the Senate in ’12, that turned the whole country over to ‘em. 

The governor up in Wisconsin got his way in ’11; he killed off the public-employee unions.  Teachers couldn’t make any money any longer, so they all up and quit; the Governor responded by suspending credential requirements in Wisconsin schools – before long, grade schools were being taught just like they were back in the 19^th century – by housewives, retired people and the few who felt they didn’t have any other options.

The brain-drain affected every other aspect of Wisconsin government – those who could; got jobs in the private sector, or just retired before the new pension-laws went into effect.   For a time, the State’s entire information-technology department was run by a twenty-two year old system administrator, who spent most of his time ordering in pizza for his ‘crew’ and playing videogames on the State’s dime. 

Several other states followed this lunacy.  Perry in Texas was the next governor to jump on board – Texas didn’t have collective bargaining, but they had a State pension fund which could be raided to balance the books, and that’s what they did.  In the end, it was just a matter of time before the rest fell in behind them.

I can’t imagine that it was pleasant, being President Romney in ’13; there were twenty states near-to-default at that point; he was 100% beholden to the Wall Streeters for his job; the Chinese were pounding on him to do something about the nation’s economy – and he had nearly fifteen million homeless to deal with; the number growing every month - a fair number of them enraged veterans of our Middle Eastern wars.

When he finally cried ‘uncle!’ in ’13 and submitted a budget calling for the closure of about half of our military bases and the reduction of the armed forces by one-third, the Teabaggers and others who’d voted for him screamed bloody murder – the Wall Street crowd wasn’t happy, either, because it turns out that even though the companies they represented were all ‘international’ by then, having a country as a host which was spending the last of its real wealth on an army which supported their interests was a good thing to have – especially for free.

I don’t suppose the Federal Government would have survived much past ’16 in any event – no one was going to loan them any more money; Wall Street was nearly done with moving its operations overseas, and we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  

I suppose some of you have felt or sensed genuine fear at some point in your lives – either working for a company which later went broke, or something similar – I tell you, it was possible then to smell the fear in the air – you walked down the street; you felt it – everyone was afraid.  Something had to happen.  No one can live like that for long, and we weren't all that exceptional there, either.

As I said earlier, I’m old.  Today, things are a lot different; people don’t have what they did when I was in my thirties, I can tell you – but they’re not afraid, either. 

I suppose that’s worth something.