Positive Reconstruction - Keeping it Personal - 2029 and Beyond

This will be the ACTUAL final post in the positive reconstruction scenario, as I think it fitting we follow our four protagonists through to at least 2060 or so. Don’t worry though, we will only hit the high points, and there won’t be much filler exposition about the collapse of the Russian Federation or the Sterilization of the Fertile Crescent. Even the concurrent overthrow of the established order in Mexico won’t get much treatment here, because unlike the dystopian scenario, it doesn’t lead directly to a series of disastrous wars. All that said, let us follow our four characters over the coming decades. 

I bet you can guess where Marty's story is going...

Marty Jr. - Solidarity Michigan identifies Marty’s firm as a crucial piece of the regime. Unlike the foot dragging that enabled much of the protesting and gave rise to the term ‘Mitten Minute’, the new state government wastes no time seizing their offices and going through the data with a fine-toothed comb. Marty and all his coworkers are put on ankle monitors and forbidden to leave the state until prosecutors determine what charges they will face. Members of Solidarity MI, and future historians, will finger-wag this decision as being too lenient. Marty, along with hundreds of agents of the regime, validate this position when, in late August, 2029, they storm the state capitol in support of the rather uncreatively named 2029 Oligarch’s Coup. They, along with other coup plotters around the country, almost succeed in bringing down the Solidarity government. Of course, ‘almost’ is not the same as success. In the wake of their failure, Marty, his family, and many regime supporters, escape across the river to Ontario.  Fortunately for Marty and family, they rank fairly low on the extradition request list, and board a charter jet for the UK before local police can take them in.

Marty and family bounce around the EU, staying one step ahead of extradition requests until they wind up in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Marty finds work running a bot farm pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda on various social media platforms. This keeps the family fed, clothed and sheltered, but his kids grow up speaking more Russian than English. Tina feels suffocated by the constant in-fighting of the American ex-pat community. Marty is unable to attend his mother’s funeral in the wake of the 2038 Pandemic, due to travel restrictions and a still-active arrest warrant.

His kids don’t know their cousins, hardly remember their grandmother, and consider themselves more Russian than American. In the wake of the pandemic, the Russian Federation collapses. The local strongman turns Saint Petersburg and surrounding oblasts into an independent city-state. Marty manages to stay on the good side of the new bosses, and the family’s material conditions even improve enough that he can host a family reunion in 2049. The event goes well enough, but the siblings cannot overcome the underlying tension. No follow-up visits take place. This personal failure finally leads Marty to recognize that he wasn’t the protective family patriarch he thought his father wanted him to be. Marty grows old, haunted by the fact he was one of the bad guys and can never go home.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Jillian - After the Revolution of ‘28, Jillian and the remaining employees make the church the permanent location and run the clinic as an employee-owned co-op. Sweeping reforms at the federal level transform Medicare into a single-payer system. As important, Solidarity OH abolishes private health insurance, and passes laws forbidding private equity firms from owning or operating health care facilities. While ongoing financial crises stemming from federal debt defaults and Wall Street speculative bubbles continue to buffet the US economy, Solidarity prioritizes the provision of health care. Many Americans go bankrupt in the 2030s, but never from the cost of health care. 

 The couple have a second child in 2031, a healthy baby boy the name Robert in honor of his uncle. With her mother near to help out, the family enjoys a degree of stability they never knew under the Old Regime.  Jillian and Chris do such a good job keeping the clinic open and navigating the lean years of the early 2030s, the Ashtabula City Council votes to put them in charge of the city hospital in 2037. Jillian never shies away from working the ER or walking the floors of Ashtabula Cooperative Hospital, which puts her on the front lines during the Tropical Flu Pandemic of 2038. The outbreak makes the 2020 pandemic look like child’s play. Over the course of two years, the disease claims some 200 million lives worldwide, including Jillian’s mother. Jillian contracts the virus as well, and must live with lung damage as a result, for the rest of her life.

Speaking of which, Jillian and Chris run ACH until retirement in 2060. At the request of the congregation, St. Joseph’s Church sets up and maintains an altar to honor Jillian’s life and the role she played getting the community through the dark decades of the 20s and 30s. After her death in 2073, she is literally considered a saint by the Ashtabula community. The parish priest puts together a case for beatification and sends it to Rome. While the church turns down consideration for sainthood, they give permission to rename the church St. Joseph and Jillian Catholic Church.

The Helot Youth League?
Not the catchiest name, Bobby.

Bobby - The Solidarity-backed Mayor of Detroit determines the existing police department cannot be trusted due to its close collusion with federal authorities. As a stop-gap measure while the department undergoes thorough reform, police power is vested in groups like the Helots. While the city cannot fund these groups at pre-revolution levels, Bobby, and most of Detroit, is used to getting by on less. He spends 2029 patrolling the streets of his neighborhood, trying to keep a lid on violent crime. Fortunately for the Helots, they enjoy a degree of genuine community support that allows them to do more with less. 

When the Oligarch’s Coup kicks off in August, groups like the Helots join the hundreds of thousands of other Detroiters in overrunning communication and security facilities used by the counterrevolutionaries. Fortunately for everyone involved, the death toll is fairly low. No one in Detroit wants the old regime back, and the security services supporting the coup quite quickly come to the conclusion they don’t have the firepower or support to fend off a quarter million protestors.

In the weeks after the failed coup, Bobby gets access to Marty’s work computers, and helps identify those who took part in the coup attempt. In his spare time, he eventually tracks down Grandma Tran and arranges for her return. She is one of over half a million people being held by ICE in deplorable conditions, but who they were unable to deport. The plight of these people, eventually referred to as the Purgatories, becomes a central part of the criminal cases pursued against the architects of the old regime.  Bobby’s work decoding his brother’s data plays an important part in both the prosecutions and showing the world the cruelty at the heart of the Old Regime.

On the strength of this detective work, Bobby rises through ranks of the reformed DPD. In 2035, he marries one of Grandma Tran’s distant nieces, but tragedy strikes in 2038. Bobby contracts the tropical flu, and brings it home. Both his wife Minh and their two-year old daughter Jade die in the first wave of the pandemic, but Bobby survives. Unsurprisingly, he suffers a nervous breakdown, and moves to Ashtabula in 2039 to be close to his surviving family. He works for the county sheriff, and while he lives out the rest of his life with a woman named Sherry and her two boys, they never marry. Bobby helps raise his stepsons and looks out for his niece and nephew. In his spare time, he runs a youth sports league until retirement. 

To the rest of the world, Bobby is a hero of the revolution, but late at night, just before he falls asleep, Bobby sometimes wishes he hadn’t turned the truck around that morning in ‘28. He speculates that Minh would be alive and well if he’d died in the planned attack on the ICE facility. He would never have had to watch his daughter struggle to breathe in a crowded ward full of dying children. Bobby carries these doubts with him the rest of his life, and prays to a god he doesn’t really believe in, that the country they are rebuilding is worth the costs they all paid to make it possible.

If it pleases the court, next time shall we
skip the fascist cosplay and go straight to the 
1946 part of the story?

Allison - After collecting and circulating evidence of the regime’s atrocities, Allison and Chantel become targets for counterrevolutionary violence. Numerous death threats end up taped to the door of the chicken fry place, and eventually, on her family’s apartment door. In the dark of night, Allison, her mother Ruby, and Inequality by Design protagonist Jenny, hustle their packed bags down the stairs and into a friend’s waiting car. After settling in at a new apartment, Allison goes back to work feeding the Firestone neighborhood. Her ex-boyfriend, a Memphis police officer, turns up at the restaurant, claiming he had no idea how bad the FedEx facility was. He gives Allison names and pictures of the ICE agents targeting her and Chantel, then offers to help her take the men out. Allison declines his offer, and the man turns angry, calling her ungrateful, among other things. 

As it turns out, the men he identified are not ICE agents, but are cops who resigned from the department before the protests in 2028 kicked up. While she is talking to one of them, other men open fire on the bus stop they’re standing at. Fortunately, the former Memphis cop is a better shot. He and Allison escape the area, while one former ICE agent does not. The man stays with Allison for a few days as they try to figure a way out of the situation, when the oligarchs attempt their coup. In the chaos and violence that engulfs Tennessee, very few questions ever get asked when the other two ICE agents wind up face down in the Mississippi River.

In 2032, Allison gets elected to the Tennessee state legislature, representing north Memphis. She works closely with Chantel on the Committee for Truth and Reconstruction, which exposes the many abuses of the old regime and puts on trial many of its local architects. This process provides a degree of justice to victims and allows her friend Dora to process and overcome her trauma. During the tumult of these early, post-revolution years, Allison realizes her trust and confidence in Chantel goes beyond friendship, and the two end up getting married in 2035. They adopt the orphan children of a mutual friend who dies in the chaos of the attempted coup.

Speaking of the oligarchs, they do not let the failure of the 2029 coup distract them from regaining power. Through local intermediaries, in the mid 2030s they begin buying up distressed assets and ousting members of Solidarity Tennessee from the legislature. Realizing that breaking the oligarch’s power will take more than continual vigilance, Allison and Chantel write a law that becomes a national blueprint and sets off the most radical restructuring of the US economy in 150 years. Without going into too much detail, their law strips legal business entities of the legal protections that grew up around corporations starting with the 1886 Supreme Court decision in the Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad case. What begins with the Tennessee Corporate Revocation Act of 2034 culminates in a national law which abolishes corporate personhood and mandates worker ownership of all businesses beyond a set dollar/employee threshold. 

Allison retires from the state legislature in 2040, returns to Memphis, and runs a community 3rd place co-op in the old Firestone neighborhood. As the challenges of the post-revolution years fade from public consciousness, Allison’s possible role in the extra-judicial killings of former ICE agents comes back to public attention with the publication of an oligarch-funded expose book in 2051. This smear campaign tarnishes her public reputation, accusing her, and the Revolution in general, of self-serving lawlessness. Allison and Chantel withdraw from public life, even going so far as to leave Memphis for a small farm in central Tennessee.

By her 50th birthday in 2058, it seems her life story has run its course. Allison frets that she avoided dying as a hero, and thus lived to see herself become the villain. But the Greenland Collapse and subsequent refugee crises of the 2060s allow Allison one more chance to serve the people of Tennessee and prove to the wider world that she always put the good of the community before everything else. But that would be a story for another time…

So there you have it. 

I hope you all have enjoyed this brief journey into the potential for positive reconstruction in the years ahead. The Winter Solstice, along with a number of other “depths of winter celebrations” will soon be upon us, but we humans, ever the optimists, turned the longest night of the year into a festival of light for a reason. Even in the most barren times, we must remind ourselves that the seeds of new growth are always present. Warmth, light and spring rains will return to nurture the seedlings, if we are willing to sow them.

The blogging will go on a brief hiatus while Ryan and I regroup and come up with new posts to start off the new year: less speculation, more hard data and commentary on current events in the tortured political economy of these United States. Until then, be well and raise a glass to the turning of the season.

Positive Reconstruction in 2028 - Keeping It Personal

Bobby

The Helots take losses with arrests and disappearances, but something has changed. For every man they lose, two take their place. And it’s not just semi-employed young men on the fringes of the economy or civil society. Young women, though not as numerous, show up and carry out missions and acts of resistance. Even older War on Terror veterans turn up to provide training, alibis and safe houses.
And this year feels like their time. On New Years Day, Bobby and a pair of friends talk about how this year might mark the high water mark of the class war. While none of them know how decisive it will be, 2028 shapes up to being decisive quite quickly. The Helots provide protection to the massive protests that rock Detroit for the first half of the year. Strikes grind the auto industry to a halt, going on their own strike, independent of the nation-wide stand-up strikes.

London gets it. Why don’t we?

The optics of what was supposed to be a resurgent manufacturing sector paralyzed by strikes is too much for the regime to tolerate. ICE shows up in force that summer and attacks a picket line with live rounds. The deaths pile up as protestors scatter. The Helots have plenty of guns, this is America, after all, and that night they vote to break the rule they’d kept for years. Dozens of ICE agents are shot and many killed over the following weeks. The governor activates the National Guard and tries to lock down Detroit.

But as we’ve seen, many guardsmen and women did not sign up to murder their fellow citizens. They drag their feet, call out sick, and generally don’t follow instructions from federal agents. The Michigan Guard’s tendency to tell the federals that they’d carried out a task when they most certainly had not becomes an internet meme. This is the 21st century, after all. The phrase “A Mitten Minute” becomes not-so-subtle code for “it’s gonna take a REAL LONG TIME for that to happen.”

In August, one of the female Helots gets ahold of a key card for the CBP facility located on 3rd Avenue. She also reveals that the facility does not hold prisoners, so collateral casualties should be kept to a minimum. It presents the Helots with a deadly opportunity. One of the Helots steals a truck from a repo lot; another steals a 40 gallon barrel of liquid chlorine from his job. The Helots plan to drive the truck into the delivery bay, unload the chlorine barrel, break open the lid, then run. The delivery men will pray their industrial respirators will work long enough, about 90 seconds, for them to get out of the building before the chlorine gas concentrations reach fatal levels. Bobby agrees to drive the truck, and hand-writes a letter to his mother, apologizing for the act of terrorism they’re about to commit. He leaves the letter with an elderly protestor at Siani-Grace.

The next morning, Bobby spends a little extra of his couch change on a nice coffee at the corner shop. He spends extra time attempting to flirt with the overworked barista. Failing to make any kind of connection, he walks out to the truck. The truck engine fails to start at first, and a quick wave of relief floods him. But his co-conspirator figures out the problem; they needed to replace the key’s battery. The pair drive in silence along Michigan Avenue, the skyscrapers of downtown sparkle in the mid-morning sun.

Neither of them brought any electronics, so his fellow Helot suggests they turn on the radio. The morning sports talk show is interrupted with breaking news from Lansing. Protestors have overrun the state capitol building and the governor is reading a letter of resignation. He then appoints a pro-Solidarity union leader as acting governor. As they turn off Michigan Avenue onto 3rd, the legislators and crowds cheer as the freshly-minted governor vows to shut down ICE facilities and expel the federal agency from the state.

As if the new governor is speaking directly to them, he specifically asks ‘groups seeking radical action’ to support state and local agencies in confining and ridding the Wolverine State of the harmful federal presence. Bobby and the other Helot exchange glances, turn the truck around, and drive quietly back to west Detroit. Over the following weeks, they will drive the wounded to hospitals, transport materiel in support of the national guard, and provide security in the November election. No one at the job site the chlorine disappeared from ever asks too many questions about why the barrel went missing for over a week.

Allison

The chicken fry place becomes a hot spot for local organizations, focused primarily on mutual aid. As the year goes on, the clientele changes as well, with formerly middle-class patrons showing up to lend time, money, and amusingly self-assured advice about what the poors need to do to negotiate these trying times. Allison begins working regularly with a young woman named Chantel, a 3-L law student at the University of Memphis, on a legal-defense fund for arrested protestors. Fortunately for those being hauled away by the cops and paramilitaries, young legal students work tirelessly to get them out of jail.

These efforts frustrate the local ICE commander, but the mayor of Memphis refuses to shut down the Firestone neighborhood chicken fry. Protests and stand-up strikes escalate until the governor announces the suspension of ‘28 election, citing threats to sitting federal senators and US house representatives. To rub salt in this wound, the state legislature votes to prioritize electricity to data centers over residential users. The state explodes with protest.

Tear gas fills the streets as residents of larger cities like Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga drive out debt collectors and shut down transmission lines to data centers. While her mother Rose and grandmother Jenny desperately scramble to keep up with rent, Allison throws herself further into the task at hand; working with utility crews and micro-farmers to keep the Firestone neighborhood’s lights on and food moving around the community.

In late September, far-right paramilitaries and ICE agents seize control of state government operations. Rumors, accurate, as it turns out, that ICE is building up supplies and bringing in extra agents to the FedEx facility, sparks a broad uprising. Protestors blockade the roads to and from the airport. Jillian is there, delivering food to protestors, the night a a dozen armored personnel carriers approach the barricades. Crouched behind a jacked-up pickup, she watches as a representative of the protestors approaches the lead APC. They exchange brief words at a distance, then the camo-clad soldier disappears into the belly of the vehicle.

Jillian hears numerous safeties click off on small arms throughout the Memphis crowds. The hatch of the APC pops open, and the soldiers climb out. One of them carries a broomstick with the Tennessee flag tied to it. They shout that they’ve come to help the people of the city. The crowd, including Allison, erupt with cheers. They turn their attention to the chain-link fence around the airport, and ICE facility beyond. The protestors-turned-armed-mob-turned-citizen-militia follow the guardsmen in the APCs, and after a 90 minute gun battle, overrun the FedEx hub.

Finally, the boomerang effect hits the Empire.

What they find inside shocks even the most cynical souls. Allison and Chantel spend days interviewing victims and documenting the killing cages and comfort couches. The images and accounts they circulate to the rest of the nation via third-party websites in Europe break through in a way that even graphic images of bloodied elderly protestors and tear-gassed strikers did’t. Tennessee counties hold November elections over the objections of a state ‘government’ whose power barely extends beyond the city limits of Nashville. The state, along with Allison and her family, votes to secede if the federal government does not honor the results. Anyone with a screen and a working internet connection spends early January combing through every feed from the US Capitol. When the regime finally throws a white flag out a window of the still-no-finished White House ballroom, the streets of Memphis fill up again. This time, the people drink, dance, and shoot fireworks. The party lasts for days.

Positive Reconstruction in 2028 - Keeping it Personal

Marty

Monitoring his mother’s travels to Detroit in late 2027 didn’t yield much interesting info. Her car spends hours parked at Sinai-Grace Hospital. When she tells him she’s visiting a friend battling stage four cancer, Marty accepts her answer. Soon, the railway strike erupts, morphs into the overtime law protests, and Marty spends many sleepless nights at the office. The firm demands a lot of overtime (that they don’t get paid extra for) tracking and disrupting protest groups for the regime. Marty justifies missing his kids’ field trips and T-ball games, because if he doesn’t fight for the regime, who will? And if no one fights for stability, for law and order, what kind of world will he leave to his kids? Marty even finds himself saying this out loud, first to Trey, then to Tina, “If daddy doesn’t protect you, who will?”

One of those cars has a tracking device in it the owner doesn’t know about.

The overtime law protests don’t don’t get off the ground in Michigan at first, because the organizers of these protests make the mistake of using regular channels of social media and cell phones. But then the protestors change tactics, using networks of retirees with time on their hands, to go door to door, delivering messages about which street corner to show up on, and when. 

Then, the primary protests erupt, combining demands for repeal with demands for reform. Marty allows himself a moment of self-doubt when Detroit PD assists ICE in clearing street corners and detaining hundreds. When he comes home one morning, he finds his mother asleep on the couch, bandages on both wrists. She tells him the bandages are just for some IV treatments she’s receiving. But Marty removes them and realizes her frail old skin has been torn off all around her wrists. His mother finally admits she was arrested for carrying a sign in front of Sinai-Grace protesting Medicare cuts.

Marty rages at his mother, ultimately throwing her out of the house, who moves back to Ohio to live with Jillian and Chris. Marty doubles down on surveilling his own family from work. And the firm has plenty of work. Protestors show up daily at federal representatives’ offices demanding repeal of the overtime law, restoration of Medicare benefits, and free and fair elections. They intercept texts between two protestors vowing to shoot a congressman, only to find the texts were sent between burner phones, and the swat team sent to bring the suspects in gets ambushed.

As if on cue, the protests go entirely offline. His firm is powerless as they watch as the masses occupy the state capital building and push out (literally) anyone opposed to holding free federal elections. The governor calls out the National Guard to evict protests but they turn on the governor and join the protests. Marty watches in horror as the governor appoints a pro-Solidarity leader Lieutenant Governor, then resigns and flees to Argentina.

Like prayer, it is often the last refuge of scoundrels.

Jillian

For the first two months of 2028, the new ‘health club’ operating out of the basement of St Joseph Church goes about caring for the routine needs of parishioners and neighbors. But as late March arrives, the Ohio secretary of state refuses to set a date for primary elections, and stand up strikes start to hit the transportation sector. Strikers and protestors gather at a city park across the street from the church, using the public baseball diamonds as sights to organize and swap information. When she arrives and leaves the clinic every day, Jillian can look up Lake Avenue to the Ashtabula County Medical Center, or across the Ashtabula River at the crowds in Cederquist Park. On the afternoon of April 1st, the park is filled with smoke.

You’ve got to go around back and us the knock if you want healthcare. 

People emerge from the smoke, climbing down the river bank, crossing the shallow bed, and claw their way up the embankment to the church grounds. Jillian texts Chris, telling him to keep the baby indoors, that she will not be getting home on time. Jillian and the staff set up a triage area in the church parking lot, directing seriously injured patients requiring surgery to head up Lake Ave, while others with minor injuries get treated in the basement. Some refuse to go to the medical center, certain that federal and state police will be there to arrest them. The clinic stabilizes dozens of injuries before turning off the lights around midnight.

The next day, everyone in the city wakes up to the reality that the previous day’s events were not an April Fools joke. Two protestors died of injuries overnight, and when Jillian arrives at the church-turned-clinic the next morning, she finds two local cops, two state troopers, and two unidentified federal agents waiting. They inform her that any facility treating traumatic injuries in the city will be shut down on suspicion of aiding and abetting terrorism. Patients waiting for routine treatment mill about on the sidewalk across Lake Avenue. When Jillian informs them the clinic is being shut down, a crowd gathers. Insults get hurled across the street. The church priest tries to intermediate between the two sides, but as more people show up and block the avenue, the situation escalates.

The mayor arrives, along with the chief of police. He surveys the scene. Jillian and the priest stand up on the bed of a jacked-up pickup parked across both lanes of traffic, and ask the city officials if they will deny healthcare to the citizens of the city. The mayor shakes his head, and tells his officers to go about their morning patrols, to leave the church alone. Patients and protestors file past the four remaining cops, who are unable to stop their numbers. Many patients sneak black market medical supplies into the clinic in handbags or tucked into coveralls.

Five-finger discounts are way better than anything the pharmacy benefit manager can offer.

That summer, her mother shows up from Michigan, giving Jillian and Chris much needed- support watching their little boy. State police threaten to shut down the church, which brings the last of the fence sitters into the conflict. Jacked-up pickups sit side by side with imports to block the streets around the clinic. The police back down and election day puts Solidarity candidates into offices low and high across Ohio. Despite the grinding poverty and economic chaos, the city throws quite a block party in the parking lot of St Joseph’s that lasts the better part of three days. By November, Jillian’s mother’s wrists have fully healed, and three generations of the family join the revelers.