Subject: Thanksgiving 2022
> More Change is coming.
>
>
"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 Civility 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 VeggieMeat 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'
historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of
its luster.
>
> Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting.
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 kind 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 2012, when all the real nonsense began.
>
> "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.
>
>
> Mark Twain once said: “It’s easier to fool people than to
convince them that they have been fooled.”
>
>
