It would be approximately fifty years from today. It would also represent approximately
the year that Poe allowed himself to wonder about concerning who might be elected
President in the next election after it (2048). It is chosen here because, were I to survive to
that date, I would be 100 years old. Now, on good days, I do plan to make it well beyond
that point, although on other days, my eagerness to do so wanes considerably. For one
thing, it is doubtful that I could enjoy a good cigar to celebrate, that ability having been
lost long ago to those who knew I could never reach that age if I indulged (but they also
told George Burns that). But after all, that is not what they had in mind at all, was it? By
then, it will not only be tobacco, but cheeseburgers, fries, maybe even onion rings, and
certainly alcohol, that will be outlawed. On the other hand, marijuana will probably be
legal -- for medicinal purposes only, of course. The internal combusiton engine will have
been discarded by policy makers who came to their senses about the damage they were
doing to the biosphere. We will undoubtedly be building our domiciles into the earth, so as
not to have to destroy trees for lumber, or use the resources that were once used to make
insulation, etc for construction. We already knew, back in 1997, that straw made a much
better insulation material.
Some sort of mass transit system will have been built to replace the wasteful,
psychologically damaging, and terribly bloody, highways. But where will be go? Why, we
will have to be whisked about from place to place to do the labor that the NLS (national
labor pool) finds for us to do -- squeezing oil from shale in the Rockies this year, planting
trees to reclaim another abandoned area of the rust belt next year, and to Canada or
Mexico to work the fields the next summer or winter. It will also be free to travel on the
NMTS (national mass transit system), and social security and medicare and national health
care crises will have also been resolved by the higher tax rate which we will all be pleased
to pay due to the magnificent level of our wonderful lives.
Bill Clinton was, afterall, right, when he wrote into his first budget back in 1993 that tax
rates would reach the level of 85 % by this time. Indeed, it is from him now, in 2046, that
we trace the beginning of all that is good that has happened since then. There were
detractors, back then, who did not want to acknowledge that it was actually his work that
the budget balanced before the millenium. But the budget has remained in balance since
then, by and large, due to his efforts late in his second term in securing a constitutional
amendment to automatically raise taxes anytime there was a revenue shortfall.
He also was among the first to have the wisdom to recognize that we all couldn't be rocket
scientists. And since that was the case, we had to have a government with the tools and
capacity to control and care for the great hordes of the underclass capitalism was
producing. They all had a decent standard of living because Mr. Bill made certain that they
got their basic human needs requirements met by government programs. I lost that
argument to him way back in the 1960's at SDS meetings where it was debated. I am sure
he was there. That is a good part of the reason that I made the blunder of leaving the SDS
and joining the YAF. But then we all can't have the gift of wisdom and prophecy.
Economic growth and development had slowed dramatically, but with Al Gore's
Presidency to launch the first eight years of the new century, that was not the concern
anyway. We became more worried about how much we could cut growth to save the
planet.
But Gore was just a scratch of the surface of the wonderful new era of the twenty-first
century. He had granted a full pardon to Bill Clinton to save him from the GOP's savage
attacks, but they had now faded to a mere shadow of a party. With the continuing illegal
immigration into the country, and the movement to expand the franchise by doing what
was fair and let them vote in the country they had chosen to put their faith in, if not their
citizenship, Democrats reaped huge vote returns. Well before that happened, however,
Gore had named William Jefferson Clinton to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And
that created an interesting arrangement when Hillary Clinton succeeded Al Gore to the
Presidency in both 2008 and 2012. By the end of her terms of service, Bill was actually (as
he had been all along, to those who were really keeping score), the only conservative
justice left on the court.
The demographics of the country were changing dramatically, too. We not only had our
first woman President with Hillary Clinton, but after her, we got our first Hispanic
President, and her two terms were followed by the two terms of the first black man elected
President. But that was old news by now, twenty years beyond the end of his second term.
By now, in fact, the country was no longer a majority white population. The population
had rather stabilized by the second decade of the new century, so that there would be still
only 350 million Americans by mid century. Of that number, 90 million were black and
120 million were Hispanic, a clear majority of that whole. Indeed, Spanish was by now
recognized as a co-equal national tongue by law in the country. Puerto Rico had been
made a state during Hillary's first term, and before she was finished, the liberated Cuba
was also admitted to the Union. By 2046, there were actually 60 states in the United
States, for those two had been followed by the Bahamas/Virgin Islands, Jamaica, first
Quebec, and then Greater Newfoundland, Columbia (the former British Columbia and
Alberta), Saskatchewan/Manitoba, and finally Ontario. To round out the number,
California had been split just above Santa Barbara, with the northern part becoming the
new 60th state of Sierra.
Now there was even a movement to reduce the number of states by consolidating the
states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Maine as a new entity called New England. Then, too, there were similar efforts to
combine New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, as well as North and South Dakota with
Minnesota, and Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Idaho as one, and Nebraska,
Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. It made sense administratively, and would once again
reduce the number of states to 42 after Nevada was merged with California. and New
Mexico and Arizona were combined. There were some looking forward to bringing
Mexico and central America into the Union before the end of the 21st century.
Other changes were underway. In this more enlightened era, it was no longer deemed
appropriate to have the names of important entities and monuments dedicated to such
terrible individuals as Washington. The state would keep its name, despite a furor equal to
that over the naming of Columbia when it was admitted, but the capitol would become just
another city in Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware, for which some were suggesting the
name of Clinton -- the city itself would be more appropriately be named Banneker. The
changes already effected had reduced the remaining Republican presence in the Congress,
and especially the Senate, and the hoped for expansion of the Union was expected to
increase Democrat voting strength.
Economic growth had declined each year since about 2006, as it had to do to preserve the
environment. That might have meant declining living standards, except for the
redistributive policies that had been set up. We now had no poverty in this greater United
States. Or, at least there was officially no unemployment (much as there had been none in
the former Soviet Union). Due to the baby boom phenomenon, there was no actual
increase in the number of unemployed in the country, either. And the media, following
every cue, played this by the party line. We were all doing so much better, and the earth
was better for it. The fact that the living standard of the country was approaching the level
of most countries we had once called the Third World was indicative of the enlightened
age we had ushered in. Those countries were not in such dire straits any longer, either, as
the world's population had also been brought under control. It has reached seven billion by
the first decade of the new millenium, but it had declined after that until by mid-century it
was expected to level off at a tolerable 5 billion individuals.
The most dangerous development for the nation as the middle of the twentyfirst century
approached, however, was the geographical demographics that were developing. As it was
growing, there were simultaneous divisive characteristics to population distribution that
were occuring. These were, in many ways, not dissimilar to those that developed in the
years leading up to the Civil War two hundred years earlier. Fifty years before this, there
was a lot of talk about the two Americas, one white and one black, that were evolving, but
at mid-century, there were faults across the foundation of the country that were pulling it
apart, again.
There was, for instance, Hispanic America, which largely followed in a curve around the
Gulf of Mexico and then proceeded across the southwest. The African American
population was concentrated in the deep South and urban centers mostly of the midwest
and east. And then there was the rest of the country. But these sharp cleavages were
compounded by stark political divisions which paralleled them. And despite the rhetorical
machinations of the dominating liberal politicians, the declining living standards
aggravated such tensions. The nation had continued along a path toward
deindustrialization from the beginning of the century, after a brief respite following the
1980's which lasted to the end of the twentieth century. In fact, the situation in the country
was in many respects quite like that of 1846.
It did not help that many of the changes that had been wrought politically and
economically had been by and large imposed on the country from without through the
United Nations, and ancillary economic entities like the IMF. What is worse, the
Constitution had by now become a shadow document, largely irrelevant to the liberal
agenda. In its place had been developed a Situational Constitution aggregation. Part of the
loss that accompanied that was the abrogation of constitutional rights. Hayek had been
correct. We had slipped well along the road to serfdom. What is even worse, the
consequences of the last fifty years was driving us rapidly toward another civil war, or
short of one, a dissolving of the union. On the global scale, Malthus had been proven
correct, too, but by policy choice. And ancillary to all that was the corollary that the arc of
Malthus was to totalitarianism.
And in the midst of all that, I was about to turn 100 years old. And this is a good day?
Return to beginning of Spring 98 issue
