Only 10
years away.....!
______________________________________________________________
"Winston, come into the dining
room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband.
"In a minute,
honey, it's a tie score," he answered.
Actually Winston wasn't very
interested in the traditional holiday football
game between Detroit and
Washington .
Ever since the government passed the Civilit y in Sports
Statute of 2017,
outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and
the "bad example
it sets for the rest of the world", Winston was far less of
a football fan
than he used to be.
Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as
exciting. Yet it wasn't the game that
Winston was uninterested in.
It
was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey. Even though it was
the
best type of Veggie Meat available after the government revised the
American
Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of
federally-forbidden
foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry
sauce, and mincemeat pie),
it wasn't anything like real turkey.
And ever since the government
officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving
Day" to "A National Day of
Atonement" in 2020, to officially acknowledge the
Pilgrims' brutal treatment
of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.
Eating in
the dining room was also a bit dau nting. The unearthly gleam
of
government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look
even
weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold.
Ever
since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating
all
thermostats - which were monitored and controlled by the electric company
-
be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was
barely
tolerable throughout the entire winter.
Still, it was good
getting together with family. Or at least most of the family.
Winston
missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up
her legal
allotment of life-saving medical treatment.
He had had many heated
conversations with the Regional Health Consortium,
spawned when the private
insurance market finally went bankrupt, and
everyone was forced into the
government health care program.
And though he demanded she be kept on her
treatment, it was a futile effort.
"The RHC's resources are limited",
explained the government bureaucrat
Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your
mother received all the benefits to
which she was entitled. I'm sorry for
your loss."
Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his
electric car
last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel
Bill of
2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines - for everyone but
government officials.
The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too
far, and Ed didn't want to
spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between
here and there.
Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were
flying in.
Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra
cushions for the occasion.
No one complained more than John about the
pain of sitting down so soon
after the government-mandated cavity searches at
airports, which severely
aggravated his hemorrhoids.
Ever since a
terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner,
the TSA told
Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity"
in order to
stay "one step ahead of the terrorists."
Winston's own body had grown
accustomed to such probing ever since the
government expanded their scope to
just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via
Anti-Profiling Act of
2022.
That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for
"unequal
scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved.
Thus,
cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had
become
almost routine. Almost.
The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most
Americans expect a
Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives
to leave the law intact.
"A living Constitution is extremely flexible",
said the Court's eldest
member, Elena Kagan. " Europe has had laws like this
one for years. We
should learn from their example", she
added.
Winston's thoughts turned to his own children.
He got along
fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly
because she
ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that
she could
text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner..
Their only real
confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000
texts a month,
explaining that was all he could afford.
She whined for a week, but got over
it.
His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it
was
the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming,
the
bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were
"just
around the corner", but Jason had developed a k ind of nihilistic
attitude
that ranged between simmering surliness and outright
hostility.
It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the
police for smoking
a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the
Smoking Control
Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500
feet of another
human being.
Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might
have been considered excessive
before the American dollar became virtually
worthless as a result of QE13.
The latest round of quantitative easing
the federal government initiated
was, once again, to "spur economic
growth."
This time, they promised to push unemployment below its
years-long rate of
18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.
Yet
the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought,
before
remembering it was a Day of Atonement.
At least, he had his
memories.
He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would
never know
what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before government
promises to
make life "fair for everyone" realized their full
potential.
Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized
how much
things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little
by
little, so people could get used to them.
He wondered what might
have happened if the public had stood up while there
was still time, maybe
back around 2011 when things began to get really bad.
"Maybe we
wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is
enough' when we had the chance," he
thought.
Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.
