I have seen the future, and it’s just peachy!
Sometimes the Revolution is started by high ideals and a need to improve the lot of people everywhere. Sometimes it’s started by a bunch of grouchy old poops who just want things their way. The grouchy old poops kick things off, but oddly enough, everyone comes out ahead. For a while.
Their kids not having decent health care and their grandchildren not having decent health care wasn’t enough incentive, but when the Baby Boomers had a little trouble scoring, little blue pills to make those “intimate encounters” just as special as you’d hope, well something just had to be done. Welcome Universal Health care! They tried to limit it to just “old people” but then that would mean they’d have to admit they were, in fact, old, instead of just a little tired and “I just took a cold pill” and “it happens to everyone”. So everyone, whether they needed a little blue pill or not, cashed in on the Universal Health care. Not just little blue pills either, it was the whole magilla, including that Botox stuff so they wouldn’t get more wrinkles to go with the wrinkles they already had. But that wasn’t enough. Since their eyebrows were paralyzed, they couldn’t scowl at the punk-assed kids in the mall while they were doing their laps, they needed prosthetic eyebrows with little motors to make the fake eyebrows go down so they could look as grumped-off as they were at the punk-assed kids and then go up in surprise when they got the bill. Although they knew they wouldn’t have to pay their prosthetic eyebrow bill since they got Universal Health care.
It wasn’t easy to get.
"Who is going to pay for this?’ the good folks in Washington asked.
“We don’t care!” the Boomers responded.
Then a clever guy in charge of getting the money moving figured out “Hey, it’s all just money! We have gobs of it laying around here!” The Army lost out on a bunch of fighter planes, and the Navy had to make do with one fewer big boats, but the Boomers were happy and shut up for 15 minutes, so it was declared a “stunning success”.
Since it was paid for, the Boomers decided it would be a good idea to go to the doctor all the time, no matter if there was anything wrong with them or not. (Unlike now.) This meant they needed more doctors to see all these old people who weren’t going to sit and read 17 year old Good Housekeeping magazines out in the waiting rooms without raising a ruckus. So this means there was an urgent need for more doctors. And none of those “furrin” doctors neither! No, they demanded good American doctors. But that meant more kids had to be able to afford to go to doctor school to be doctors. Again, Something Had To Be Done. The Army gets fewer tanks and the Navy gets stiffed a couple more boats and suddenly there’s more kids in doctor schools.
The problem is, the kids in the doctor schools? They were victims… I mean “students” of the American Educational System. That meant, since their schools hadn’t gotten any new money since roughly 1993, they were too stupid to be doctors. So the entire American Educational System got a much needed overhaul. The Army got fewer missiles. The Navy wasn’t happy at all. Now the American Educational System was a National system, not a piece-meal local jobby. Everyone got the same standard of education for free. And it wasn’t no half-assed standard designed so the end-product knows how to say “do you want fries with that?” and give out whatever change the computer-register says is about right, it was a standard to kick out doctor-school caliber students to shut up the Boomers who just wanted a nice American doctor. And newer magazines.
But pay for schooling for those punk-assed kids that just don’t want to learn? That’s just silly! You go to school if you want, or don’t. Who cares? But if you don’t graduate (at a Twelveth Grade Level, none of this graduating High School with only an eighth grade education crap), you can’t do grown-up things. Like: drive a car, or vote in elections (real elections, not picking the “burger of the week”), or own guns, or buy liquor. You know it was those last two that kept the kids in school. There was already the infrastructure in place to keep track of who has graduated from High School (with what GPA) and who hasn’t. It was built up to keep track of those pesky terrorists, but it got switched over right quick to something where it had a chance of doing some good.
As things do, the old people got older. This meant their car insurance kept getting more and more expensive as they kept driving into things. This meant there was suddenly a need for good, reliable Public Transportation. That actually went to places people wanted to go, at a time that people actually wanted to be there . Busses and trolleys were on order within a week.
The Army didn’t even dust off their last Jeep when Canada invaded, held, got bored with, and finally returned North and South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota. My God! We were attacked by Canada! And they got away with it! Something had to be done! The choice was either give back the health care stuff, and all the education stuff, and the transportation stuff, or buddy up with our pals and have them watch our back. There might have been other options, but they weren’t really looked into at the time. The only problem is, after all the years of being the Big Dog and telling everyone How Things Would Be Done, no one really wanted to play with the US anymore. England and Australia would let us show up for vacations as long as we brought our cash, but they still weren’t very nice about it. Say you wanted to go to the opera (for whatever reason, although by now it was an “All Nude Review”) and be there by 4 o’clock (the Early Bird Show) so you had to call a cab. Normal Americans would say one another “We need to call a cab to take us to the opera.” But the English and Australians would just make stuff up. They’d say things that made no sense at all. “Shimmy the handsome tu-tu for ya-yas, yo Nelson?” This kind of talk started out in the tourist industries, but branched out to the whole culture because “it’s just so much fun”. Cuba would let us show up and smoke, but they wouldn’t even try to talk to us. So Foreign Policy took an abrupt change to “Play Nice With Others” and things settled right down. Canada even sent the US a nice fruit basket to apologize for “getting cheeky”.
But now we were playing by rules we didn’t make up. For some reason the rest of the world didn’t find acid rain “invigorating” the way the US did, so something had to be done. Luckily about this time the Mitsubishi-Purina super computer (sitting on an artificial atoll made up of old five-gallon toilets and shredded Nike running shoes) decided it had just had enough of the fluctuation power supply and changed the way the world worked. Money was out, Neo-Barter was in. It kept track of a sophisticated system of favors and responsibilities and Blanche M’Tumbu became the richest woman in the world when she sent a hand-knitted sweater to just about everyone on the planet so everyone owed her something, so she got whatever she wanted eventually. Which wasn’t that hard on anyone since all she wanted was more yarn and those chocolate covered cashews she liked so much.
The biggest benefit of Neo-Barter was that those smarty-pants scientist guys didn’t have to work for soulless multi-national corporations but could just science away at whatever caught their attention. As long as they remembered to send Blanche M’Tumbu a birthday card and maybe call her once in a while, they were free to delve into whatever needed a good delving. Within sixteen months there were twelve giant satellites sucking in solar power and spitting it back to Earth in the form of some sort of “waves” that made things go. No one really understood how it all worked, but it was cheap power that never ran out, so the Mitsubishi-Purina super computer was happy and wound up playing Pong online a whole bunch.
Things were going pretty good after that. People worked when they wanted to, had their health taken care of, could learn stuff for free, and had lots of Cajun food to eat. It’s not like they planned on eating a lot of Cajun food, but after the Mad Cow, Mad Chicken and Mad Pig epidemics, they were left with American Bison (for real Buffalo wings after the gene splicing) and crawdads. Jamaican restaurants became really popular too since the goats (nobody’s fool) kept their heads down and didn’t get Mad. (Like you could tell if a goat was Mad or just mad anyway.)
We, the Earth people, probably would have frittered away this new Golden Age, if it wasn’t for the intervention of our Benevolent Alien Overlords. Right after we “got this stinking crap-hole of a planet fixed up” (their words) they swooped in and made it the Paradise it is today. And “Overlords” is really not a fair label. “Friends from Space” has a better ring to it, doesn’t it? I mean it’s not like they put too many demands on us. Who could say slaving… working happily in the turnip mines in exchange for not having our “miserable carcasses fried with [their] space-based Destruct-O-Beams™” isn’t the fairest trade ever? Well, the turnip mines and the fondue. But it’s not like it’s a hard recipe.
Chocolate Fondue Dip for our Benevolent Alien Friends from Space
(serves about six regular Earth People or probably one Benevolent Alien Friend from Space but to be sure at least double all ingredients)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
6 ounces cream cheese
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons raspberry syrup
pinch of salt
(stuff to dip in it)
Stick all the ingredients into a non-stick pot (except the dipping stuff, duh) and melt it all down over a medium-low heat. You have to stir it a lot until it’s all smooth and melted. Then you dip stuff in it and it’s real good.
The stuff you want to dip in it could be just about anything for us Earth people (I like to dip bananas and apples and sometimes pretzels), but our Benevolent Alien Friends from Space like to dip cats for eating. Because they’re from Melmac and that’s the way it is there.
-Rue.
), and they need $450 each for that. Plus spending money.
You know you will, cause empty space needs stuff in it. Can’t let all that empty space go to waste now can ya?