A Blog Post From The Glorious Future

There was some jowly congressman who tried to set himself on fire when the reforms started. That’s probably what I’ll remember most about the Great Redo or whatever people call it today. 

I was in eleventh grade when it happened. I don’t remember which congressman it was because I've never really cared about politics all that much. I mean, I vote because it's the law but whatever. Pretty sure this congressman was from Texas but I’m too lazy to look it up. Who cares anyway. 

The point is that this guy stands on the steps of the Supreme Court the day after the president just went ahead and added a bunch of justices to the Court (some people said this was illegal but who knows) and gives this longwinded speech about freedom and the country's founders and some guy named Reagan and then he sprays lighter fluid on his suit and sets himself on fire. The guy instantly starts screaming and running up and down the stairs and begging his staffers to douse him with their water bottles, which they did within like thirty seconds. 

The congressman was fine. I remember a video of him in his singed navy blue suit and red tie crying and cursing the president’s name and whatnot. It was so damn funny. My friends and I couldn’t have given a shit about politics but we watched that shit five hundred times. “Put me out! Put me out!”

That’s mostly what I remember about the early days of the Redo. The Democrats had finally won an election and everyone was talking about major reforms and changes and shit but no one really believed it until it just happened one day. Life just sorta changed after all those judges were added to the Surpeme Court. A lot of politicians who had been involved in the camps a long time ago in the Bad Days went to prison or fled to Russia for some reason. So many crypto guys went to jail for shit I wasn’t really clear about. We learned in college about something they used to call Silicon Valley that I guess ceased to exist at some point during the Redo because of laws against “pro-extinction” language that tech nerds had been using for a long time leading up to the Redo. I guess the guys who were into artificial intelligence before the Redo had talked a lot about replacing humanity or wiping out people for a digital god, something along those lines. Crazy shit. Anyway, that somehow became illegal and no one really talks or thinks about the weird AI cults that had run the government for a while. 

Some sort of case involving gun rights was a big deal for a while, and then a few of my buddies were making crazy fucking money trading in their guns for cash from the feds and all the school shootings stopped and terrorist attacks were suddenly done with knives or small arms. My grandmother told me everyone used to have these big military guns and now no one does. People seem OK with it. 

I do know the Supreme Court stuff made things better financially for a lot of people. Apparently people used to have to pay for medical care, or I guess sometimes they just didn’t go to the doctor because they didn’t have enough money. It’s hard to think of a more barbaric situation but maybe I’m spoiled. Everyone can go to the doctor or the hospital now. Really old folks still ask for and expect bills for their medical care, which is kinda funny. I wouldn’t even know how to respond to something like that. Here’s money for … fixing me? Why would that cost anything at all? Seems pretty basic to me.

Same with college. An old guy I work with said his mom went broke trying to earn a college degree in the pre-Redo days and they had to skip meals and shit just so his mom could pay back all the money it took to go to school. That’s so fucked up I don’t even know what to say. Student loans? What the fuck.

I’m in my late 40s now. Most of what I know about the pre-Redo times came from my grandma and grandpa. They said things had been pretty OK for a long time and then people got bored and sorta lost their minds because they used websites called social media that told them to destroy themselves and the world? It’s hard to fathom for someone who didn’t live through it but there was a time, my grandparents told me, where everyone was addicted to their devices and reading the opinions of the whole world and watching videos of tragedies ten or fifteen hours a day and they all eventually broke, went psycho I suppose. My grandpa told me and my sister when we were teenagers that people used to get into car accidents all the time because they couldn’t stop using those social media sites while they drove. People used to sit in restaurants and not talk to each other while they checked for updates on the end of the world. My grandfather said everyone was really sad and super fucking nervous all the time, and that an entire generation of kids’ brains were ruined by the technology. He said we lost democracy for a while because the younger generation used the internet all day every day. 

Grandpa told us about this time he was getting a haircut during the Bad Days and a little kid next to him, no older than five or six, started screaming and biting the barber because he asked the kid to put down his tablet so he could remove the smock from him at the end of the haircut. Grandpa said the boy was like a rabid animal.

According to grandpa (and grandma), people had tricked themselves into thinking they were happy with social media, which had been programmed to addict people. Cigarettes for the brain, grandma used to say. Something about dopamine receptors. I don’t recall exactly. 

We don’t have that problem today because there is no social media. I've read about the riots that followed the social media bans. They seemed bad but fizzled out after a while (people's brains had to adjust, that's what doctors said). All those social media companies were shut down and their founders joined all those politicians and moved to Russia. I don’t really understand why everyone kept moving to Russia. The former president named Donald Trump went there too, along with his whole family apparently. Some Americans still think Trump is alive and planning his return and takeover of the government or something. I read somewhere that he would be 121 years old today so he’s probably dead. One of his sons (the tall one) sometimes makes TV appearances in Russia and claims he is the rightful president of the United States and that he’s gathering his forces to overthrow the illegitimate president, something along those lines. He seems unwell. Everyone sorta nervously laughs when those videos come out. No one really knows what he means. And we like the president. She seems like a normal person. I guess that's all you can really ask for.

A bunch of rich guys also left the US after the Redo raised taxes on them by like seven percent. A handful of the richest men and their families made a big show of escaping to Mars, saying they would start a rival Earth where people could come and work for them for free. No one ever heard from them again. Sometimes you’ll hear about a transmission from Mars about tax rates or something they call the gold standard or something. I think that’s bullshit though. They're long gone. There are no more billionaires thanks to the Redo. They say it's better this way.

And as far as I can tell, things are better today. A lot of people complained about censorship when the Redo first started. You don’t hear that much anymore today.

One of the last things my grandma told me before she died was that things changed when people kinda realized that they didn’t have to live in the Bad Times if they didn’t want to. People's imaginations had been stunted for a long time, she said. "We forgot how to dream," she told me a week or two before she passed. The bad guys weren’t so tough. They folded and ran away. Remember that, grandma said, if the Redo starts falling apart. She said it happened before with the first Redo after World War II, and it could happen again. I don’t know about that. I think we’re fine.