The year 2011. Is it a mile stone . . . . a historical mile marker . . . . . or just another year where we spend

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

a trillion or so dollars more than we can ever collect in taxes or as the democrats like to call it "Revenues".

The next 50 years looks pretty bleak and foreboding.

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 and Equal Outcome" 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 since the celebratory scoring dances had to include all the various sexes or LGBTs as President Hillary Clinton had proclaimed in her swearing in ceremony in 2016.

Two-hand touch football 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 all potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it just 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 proven 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 energy efficient fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was kinda like cadaver skin, and the room was always cold.

Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating that all thermostats - which were monitored and controlled by the electric company  be kept at 62 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 lifetime allotment of life-saving medical treatments.  He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Panel. Dad always called them the death panel. The Panel was spawned when the private insurance market finally was driven into bankruptcy and everyone except Government officials, was forced into the government health care program.

And although Winston had demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile to try to argue with a bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens temporarily hired to work as "outreach experts."  "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." We have to make room for two muslims for every one Christian.

Ed, Winston's ADHD "share"-brother, couldn't make it either. A share-brother is someone who has been unemployed for over 500 months. 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. People who had been unemployed for over 200 months were allowed a government electric vehicle IF they promised to do 6 months of public service. Ed had been laid off and on unemployment for 253 months when he got HIS electric car.

 Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a bomb onto a jetliner hidden in his anal orifice, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" of a "cavity search" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists."
Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such searching and probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via the Anti-Profiling Act of 2022.  That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," except Government officials, even when probable cause was involved.Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine.

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.
The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of seven progressives and two conservatives to leave the law intact. The Supreme Court has washed their hands of the "cavity search" issue.

"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 50 feet of another human being.