Wilson awoke. As he glanced at the clock, he shuddered. It was not that he felt cold -it was the third of July- nor that he felt frightened- there was nothing in his room to fear- but that he felt an overwhelming sense of loss. Of exactly what, he could not say.
It was not money. Ever since the passage of the National Inequality Elimination Act of 2024, all income was, by law, equally distributed. Wilson’s electricity ration of 200 kilowatt-hours per month per person was exactly the same as that of everyone else he knew. Nor was it of time -he had a fine amount of it. Roughly six hours, if not counting work, travel, or sleep. It was nothing that Wilson could point to with any real specificity.
He got out of bed and checked the news. Two Black men convicted of vehicle theft, four convicted of assault, and five convicted of armed robbery, all in the past week, all residing in the same town as he, had been pardoned under the racial equity quotas established by the Inequality Elimination Act of 2031 due to the discovery of a sentencing disparity between Blacks and non-Hispanic Whites charged with these crimes. The discussion in the news centered on whether this was enough to reduce the persistence of the unjust inequity in racial arrest and conviction rates by the police and juries around the country. A professor (of what field, Wilson did not remember) explained, in a crisp and confident voice, that the gap in sentencing and arrests would not end until racist and sexist selection of police officers by “competence tests” and “strength” requirements were finally eliminated from every page of local, state, and Federal law and random jury selection was safely replaced with a more scientific system for determining equitable racial outcomes in sentencing. Wilson ate his breakfast, consisting of a 100% American Whole Grain cereal trademarked by General Mills in a bowl of nonfat milk, some Florida oranges, and two Michigan apples.
Indeed, Wilson thought, reading the label on his cereal, his breakfast had to be 100% American. All trade with the lands outside the U.S. proper and the territories it captured or bought before 1940 had been strictly prohibited under penalty of thirty-five years’ imprisonment- the maximum sentence that could be imposed for any crimes except those defined as “exacerbated by dominant-group privilege”, such as Bernie Madoff’s or Ross Ulbricht’s, for which the maximum sentence was a limitless number of years in maximum-security prison. Even cocaine, rice, and heroin had to be home-grown.
Wilson stepped outside the multi-story apartment complex he resided in. It was owned by the local government, which, as Wilson remembered, built it under a multi-billion dollar contract with the National Construction Workers’ Union. Each resident was allotted one vote to make various important management decisions over the fate of the community, such as rent hikes, the budget allotted for repairs, the decision to expel any resident, and the establishment of any new facilities. Thus, while rent was sky-high, only kept under control by state rent-control ordinances, the complex’s budget was almost always deep into the red, the complex only being able to stay open by the generous application of Federal housing subsidies of apartments disproportionately occupied by non-heterosexuals, non-males, and non-Whites. The complex contained residents with genetic origins from almost every country in the world, including Azerbaijan, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea. This was typical of much of the United States since the 2030s. Ever since the Open Movement Act of 2020, one billion immigrants from all parts of the world, but mainly from India, China, Brazil, and Nigeria had made the United States their new permanent abode. “America”, said President Bush in October of 2020, “had at last begun its remetamorphosis into its historical namesake: a Nation of Immigrants”, his words obscured by the cheering of tens of thousands of Honduran and Salvadoran men and women gathered before him. Consequently, the apartment complex was not well-maintained, with hundreds of thousands of cigarette and marijuana butts, as well as tens of thousands of heroin and methamphetamine needles, being found scattered throughout the hallways, despite the high national taxes on the purchase of all these products and despite the fact that many dozens of less intellectually inclined teenagers were at work cleaning the hallways and the outside of the complex every day. Even while Wilson was exiting his apartment, he saw a methamphetamine addict, White, male, and grey-haired, in a black T-shirt, injecting another dose to keep himself placated while squatting on the filthy floor of the building he had slept in last night.
Wilson found his bicycle, unlocked it, and began his ride to work. Personal ownership of automobiles without written permission from the EPA had been eliminated under the Environmental Protection Act of 2024 and the International Carbon Dioxide Reduction Agreement of 2025. China was to implement this part of the agreement in thirty to thirty-five years. For now, the privileges granted to the overindulgent West for its first two hundred or so years of existence would temporarily be granted to the rising and poorer nations, which had not had the privileges granted by chance and fate to the rich West while it was rising. Wilson, of course, thought this ridiculous. Since 2027, the Chinese continuously had higher real per capita incomes than Americans, and, since 2035, higher median incomes, even in dollar terms. It was an injustice, Wilson thought, for China to get a disproportionately large share of the pollution permission pie than America simply because of the late date of il sorpasso. Wilson, naturally kept quiet, for fear of denunciation by those learned Chinese scholars who had become so prominent in the social sciences departments of the nation over the past thirty years.
As he was continuing cycling to work, Wilson marveled at the beautiful state of the roads he was cycling on. In Wilson’s youth, Maryland roads had been disasters, wreaked by potholes and in a constant state of congestion and disrepair. Today, American roads were, in every part of the nation (even Alaska, as Wilson had learned while vacationing there) every bit as good as those said to exist in Luxembourg or the Emirates due to the wisdom of the two Clinton presidencies, as well as the strong push for infrastructure spending by politicians of every stripe after the recession of 2019. In the old days, Wilson remembered, Americans were known for their devotion to their massive gas-guzzling pickup trucks, whose tires tore the roads apart like a lion’s teeth tears apart the flesh of its meal. In modern, civilized society, such titanic beasts of the road were unnecessary for civilized life, and, indeed, were widely understood to be detrimental to it. Today, America had a high-speed rail system which, though often sparsely used, was used by almost every American at some point in hir life, and was unrivaled by any other in the world, including those of Germany, China, and Japan. How the Americans of the 20th century could have greeted the expansion of car culture as a positive good was beyond Wilson’s comprehension. Were 20th century Americans deliberate Earth-killers? Or were they simply just stupid, their IQs pushed down by the copious quantities of lead in their automobile emissions and paint? Wilson didn’t know, and neither did most Americans his age.
As Wilson continued cycling by a row of evergreens, he saw a black-skinned man walking out from them towards the road, gripping his hand tightly. Wilson winced. For him to be noticed to have noticed that the person was black-skinned would, in a court of law, constitute a microaggression, an infraction punishable by a fine of $50 per conviction. Noticing that the person was male would not. Standards for determining the existence of microaggressions had been formulated by Justice Sotomayor in her majority opinion in Blake v. Regents of the University of California in 2021. Wilson kept pedaling.
“Yo’ moni, honké!”
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