Reflections from the year 2050

A creative writing exercise

Sometimes it's easier to convey ideas through storytelling than through political screeds. This story is not intended as fortune telling or prophesy or whatever, but as a portrait of a possible future. Please let me know in the comments whether you found this juvenile or fun, and whether you'd like to see more (or less) of this kind of post. - parrott

All I remember about the accident was that I was mowing the lawn while listening to racist podcasts when I crested the hill at a weird angle and felt the riding lawn mower slipping. Evidently, it flipped over onto me and I ended up in a coma that lasted for 27 years.

There's a lot to deal with when emerging from a coma: the initial disorientation and rehabilitation, the anguish at having pretty much lost one's life without having died, the bittersweet process of reconnecting with friends and family across the gap, and processing the loss of so many of them all at once. But I wish to ignore all of that in this essay to write a letter to my past self about what the world is like in 2050, from my unique perspective of having awoken in the middle of it.

It all fell apart, basically. But it fell apart in a series of minor cataclysms. The first thing that happened shortly after my accident was the Bond Market Crash, which wiped out most retirement savings and resulted in the Minor Recession. There was nothing minor about it, and it was certainly a Depression, but "Minor Recession," mocking the optimism of the experts who insisted recovery was right around the corner, caught on and stuck.

Before the Minor Recession, America was entangled in several foreign wars, but American Austerity and a series of unexpected setbacks and losses resulted in a bit of a retreat from global affairs. Ukraine became bitter towards the West, eventually restoring some trade and diplomatic relations with Russia while remaining "non-aligned." China and Taiwan worked out a diplomatic arrangement where Taiwan would become an autonomous province of Mainland China, with special privileges that largely preserved the island's status quo. Israel's problems worsened as Western aid grew less reliable and constant low grade conflict drove more and more secular and liberal families to emigrate.

Civil unrest grew in America during the Great Recession, as American Austerity hit different communities differently. The worst hit were the major urban centers, caught in a doom loop of the crashing bond market making it impossible to finance basic services, which accelerated both the commercial real estate crises and White Rapture, both of which exacerbated their municipal budgets crises.

In the years preceding the Minor Recession, Whites had been largely driven out of public sector jobs, which were hit the hardest by American Austerity. The local, state, and federal job cuts hit minorities hardest. In the cities, the economic crisis came to be known as The Black Depression, on account of its hallowing out the Black middle class.

Unlike the Great Depression, which struck the nation rather broadly, the Minor Recession had a relatively minimal impact on suburban, small town, and rural White families. The government attempted to remedy this with targeted bailouts and initiatives, but the money wasn't there. The paranoia and polarization that was already taking shape before my accident reached a boiling point, as the "libtards" and "trumpers" squared off into hostile camps.

Among the libtards, the resentment boiled over into a singular fixation on how the system structurally favors Whites over minorities. By the early 30s, enough boomers had passed away that the libtards were able to pass a series of sweeping reforms to achieve their social justice. They abolished the electoral college, achieved proportional representation in the Senate, and packed the Supreme Court with three more justices, all three of them having pledged to pursue the targeted social justice platform.

These changes terminated the American system as I had known it, with the Democratic Party taking on the spirit, tone, and corruption of South Africa's ANC. The Republican Party came unraveled shortly after Trump passed away, with Trump replacing Hitler as the great villain in half of the American imagination and becoming a symbol of hope for the other half.

Being old enough to remember the first Trump administration, and how unimpressive and moderate he actually was, this polarization around the Orange Man is amusing for me. Over thirty years ago, I planted a "Maga America Great Again" sign in my yard, and the community I'm living in remains littered with fresh new "Make America Great Again" signs decades later, as if we're permanently trapped in the 2016 election.

Just last week, despite my failing health and reservations about all the attention, I sat atop a parade float celebrating the Battle of Charlottesville. I smiled and waved as I passed by the adoring families who cheered for one of the last living Charlottesville organizers, most of whom had perished in fighting or in prison during the American Troubles of the mid-30s.

What had seemed an unmitigated public relations disaster at the time got caught in the polarization vortex in the following years. The Libtards incessantly referred to it as the opening battle in the war on minorities and the Trumpers gradually came around to seeing it as the first act of open resistance on behalf of White American families and The God Emperor.

The American Troubles of the 2030s began with a charismatic liberal politician whose message was that the answer to White Rapture was to hunt them down and take the wealth they're hoarding from the cities and the government. The whole "White Rapture" thing was a bit more complicated than that, with thriving Black and multicultural communities in the countryside, immigrants returning to their home countries, and plenty of Whites remaining behind in the cities. But the cities were largely Black and poor and the countryside was largely White and getting by, and that's what crystallized in the political discourse.

At the height of the American Troubles, the “antifa” began using drones and other methods to sabotage rural and small town infrastructure wherever possible. The electrical grid, fiber optic data lines, major water lines, and even roads were knocked out around thousands of communities. It all happened too fast for the government to repair the utilities and restore ordinary life even if it was inclined to -- and it wasn't.

The end result of these American Troubles was that the communities transitioned to alternative energy, well water, satellite internet, and a siege mentality. The fear of "grinches" (inspired by the old animation where a grinch tries to sabotage whoville) resulted in the harassment and expulsion of a lot of liberal-leaning and minority families from the semi-rural enclaves.

It's important to underscore the very regional nature of all this, with modern life as usual carrying on in East Asia, the Global South continuing to industrialize, and the world looking on at the problems in Europe and North America with concern. The rest of the world recovered from the Minor Recession within a few years, but it dragged on for decades in America on account of the commercial and industrial disruptions of the American Troubles.

The last outpost of Western life as we know it is in Argentina, where millions of American and Israeli Jews migrated to escape civil unrest. Buenos Aires is now a cosmopolitan hub of finance, entertainment, and intellectual life, surpassing the United States in research, innovation, and prosperity. Brazil is an industrial powerhouse and Venezuela is a popular vacation destination for wealthy global elites.

This may all sound pretty dystopian for an American, but it certainly doesn't feel dystopian. I just returned from riding my golf cart through a little path in the forest to the general store, which has a nice little restaurant bustling with young people, some toiling away at their online schoolwork, others up to harmless mischief. Everybody’s more happy and healthy now than they were.

These communities are all different. The one I'm in, courtesy of a niece who's given me a room to recover in, is centered around a particular church. Some of the communities are centered around political fraternities of one kind or another, and one nearby is "Odinist," rumored by the locals to be up to witchcraft.

The American Troubles have largely passed, settling into a "new normal" where those in the major cities have failed to disrupt White Rapture and are turning against one another. The federal government is still there, still claims it's the United States, and still maintains a nearby interstate highway. But it lacks any leverage to police, regulate, or tax anybody outside the major cities.

There is an ongoing effort to punitively tax the mail. Back beforehand, rural mail delivery was heavily subsidized. Now, it's the other way around, the only way for the federal government to extract any revenue from the communities. A Prohibition-style racket (Tea Party Network) grew up around working around the postal fees, but it's easy enough to just pay the bribes to corrupt local postmasters rather than bother anymore.

There were some major natural disasters, some major global conflicts, another pandemic, and everybody wears pajamas now. There's not as much technological innovation as I would have expected. There's just smart glasses most people wear instead of having phones or laptops. Monero took off big time, and I would be rich if my family hadn't lost my thumb drive.

The biggest thing to convey, perhaps, is that our problems we were arguing about in 2023 don't make sense in 2050. When the police stopped being reliable and people needed to turn to private security and neighborhood watch volunteers, everybody who didn't tribe up was vulnerable to gangs, including, in many places, the police themselves.

When you're accountable to and integated into a flesh and blood local collective that you depend on for your security and survival, women's rights, men's rights, gay rights, trans rights, and such melt away in favor of doing what's right for your team. The mass society that we existed relative to back then died a quiet heat death, and all its problems and concerns died with it.

I managed to track down one of my old right wing political contacts at a nearby park. He was very displeased with everything, lamenting the fall of Western Civilization and carrying on about the need to reclaim our government and our great cities. I had trouble paying attention to his tirade. Directly behind him, dozens of blond and redheaded children were playing on the playground equipment as a giant rebel flag flapped in the breeze.