View contact details

    “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 Veggie Meat 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 live-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 $5000 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%, (and that is
using fuzzy math)  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 2010, 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.