This story takes place just a scant ten plus years from now.  Nah, you think, can’t happen here.  We sincerely hope you are correct.  However, the time is now to make a major course direction. 

It came across our desk a day or two ago via email.  Many thanks my friend. 

    Thanksgiving 2022

       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 mince-meat 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 2011, 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…