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.