"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.
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