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.

Positive Reconstruction in 2029

I'd gotten away from posting to this blog, as I've mostly moved the posts from the Positive Reconstruction series to Substack. Ryan and I are still posting regularly to Substack under the title Compounding Fractures, to both promote Inequality by Design, as well as speak on current issues. We have series on Universal Basic Income, State Capitalism, and of course, this fictional series about the future direction of the United States. If any of that interests you, please head over there, peruse what we've written, and subscribe if you like what you read. 

Without further ado, here's the next post in the Positive Reconstruction series: 

2029 - The Eye of the Hurricane

By January 2nd, half a million citizens surround Washington. They carpool, take buses and trains, they sit in cars, crash on friend’s couches, they rent rooms, and some even camp out at parks a day’s walk from the borders of the district. The people bring signs, they bring food, they buy bottles of water for fellow travelers. Some bring hopes and dreams. Some bring cynicism or opportunism. And yes, a great many of them bring guns. The Congressional session for 2029 is scheduled to start January 3rd.

I know, this is from Maryland's Eastern Shore, but a picture of the sunrise on the Winter Solstice is too poetic to pass up.

In the last days of 2024, military bases around the district cancel leave and stock up on MREs. Junior officers and NCOs scour strip clubs and flophouses for the enlisted men and women missing from morning muster. In some units, desertion rates reach 40%. For those still on base, many report to the infirmary. Accident rates spike on bases as troops become desperate to avoid the orders they know will come down. On January 1st, several combat regiments are mobilized and deployed to interchanges along I-495 in Maryland and Virginia, just outside DC. The governors of both states ask the federal government to remove the troops, and get no reply.

Early on the morning of January 3rd, half a million Americans wake up, partake in the early morning rituals of eating breakfast, cleaning up, and start towards the nation’s capital, unsure if they will live to see the sunset. It may seem cliché in an age of global supply chains, information superhighways and trans-national corporations with budgets larger than the GDP of entire countries, but control of the levers of government still matters. America rolled the dice in 2024 and wound up in an era of lawlessness and rampant corruption, both monetary and moral. These things happen fairly regularly to peoples all around the world and throughout time. So on a not-so-chilly January morning, the country rolls the dice one more time.

The notion of who sits in the halls of Congress by the end of the day isn’t just an issue about changing the window dressing at the Capitol. In November, 16 states put secession on the ballot. The language varied a bit from state to state, but most followed the line “if the federal government refuses to seat the lawfully elected senators and congresspeople of this state, will the state consider itself sovereign and independent of federal law?” Yes or No? Of the 16 secession referendums, only one failed. And that one failed because the state, Texas, voted it down in favor of another referendum to break the state into 5 separate states and form the Lone Star Confederation. If everything is bigger in Texas, and secession is a ‘go big or go home’ proposition, Texas voters chose to go that extra mile.

I swear, this is how people south of the Red River see the world.

While the Solidarity Movement is largely decentralized, the President-elect and Congress-elect do agree they shouldn’t approach DC in one group, as every one of them knows how drones work. So the President-elect approaches, along with some 50,000 supporters and much of the congressional delegations from the Northeast Corridor, from Baltimore. The VP-elect and much of the Southern delegation gather and march from Manassas Junction. Other delegations and their supporters depart Bethesda via I-70 for the district.

Yes, the southern delegation met up at THAT Manassas before heading to DC.

In a moment made for history books, a half-strength platoon of nervous Air Force MPs halt the President-elect and their supporters at the I-495 overpass over Good Luck Road near Carrollton, MD. 

Good Luck Road at the I-495 overpass. History sometimes happens in the most unassuming places.

The MP’s commanding officer tells them to turn back, that they constitute an unlawful assembly. Ominously, drones approach, hovering over the people massed on the two lane road. The President-elect asks if the CO intends to betray his oath to the Constitution and receives the retort that his orders are lawful. A tense standoff ensues until word runs through the crowd that the Solidarity delegations from California, Nevada and Utah have been waved through the blockade at Friendship Heights and have made it as far as the Washington National Cathedral. A woman in the crowd shouts at the MPs that the blockade is over and if they fire on the crowd they’ll just be murderers. The CO orders his men to do just that.

The MPs refuse. Their NCO and junior CO arrest the senior CO and let the Solidarity people stream past. 

Later, people on both sides of this confrontation find out these reports weren’t entirely accurate. The blockade was still intact at the DC-MD line in the area of Friendship Heights, but when asked, the Army CO told the delegates the Metro system was still running. With a less-than-subtle wink, the CO stated that his orders only covered the surface roads. The delegates and their supporters made history by getting on the subway and simply riding it to the Capitol building.

Similar events play out repeatedly around the area. By lunchtime, two hundred thousand people are milling around on the National Mall, and supermajorities of the new Congress are ready to take their seats. In a scene we’ve seen before in this series, both DC and Capitol police refuse to block entrance to the Capitol Building, and in the case of the Capitol Police, actually arrest ICE and DHS agents that try. While the Solidarity-dominated Congress sits at the Capitol, the remainder of the regime barricades themselves in the White House.

Congress swears in the President and VP-elect, an event which is broadcast and live-streamed to the whole country. The President calls on all 50 states to recognize the new Federal government, and in what will go down as an act of borderline-megalomania, orders the military into the city to force the surrender of the criminals hunkered down in the White House. Fortunately for both Solidarity and the nation, the generals and admirals not holed up with the regime announce they will defer to the duly elected government.

The regime has a history of stiffing contractors. I wouldn’t finish the plumbing work either, if I were them.

By the time the sun sets, the Washington National Guard, the DC police, and 10,000 armed Solidarity supporters have the White House surrounded and the utilities cut off. Construction of the new bunker under the old East Wing included many redundancies for fresh water, gas and electricity.The regime declares they will wait out the besiegers until the military clears the streets. But at some point in the design process, unpaid construction workers ‘forgot’ to install redundancies for the sewer lines out of the building. The current regime emerges surrenders after three days of having to smell their own shit. On January 7th, the Solidarity President declares to the cheering crowds on the National Mall, the renaissance of the United States. Next week, we check in with the kids of the three protagonist from Inequality by Design. The week after, we will find out if Solidarity can make it stick.