2009: The Nightmare is Here

You’re imprisoned in a meaningless job, required to assess thousands of guest appearance applications for a TV talk show that has been officially cancelled. It’s plain as day that the work is pointless, but your boss refuses to discuss it. The division head regularly gives speeches promoting efficiency, but she would never accept it if you went over your boss’s head to approach her.

Like many workers, you weren’t given a chance by your employer, when you were hired, to opt out of the terms of the Employee Income Stabilization Act. This deceptively titled legislation, written by the business lobby, discourages employees from quitting by requiring six months’ advance notice and imposing a one-month income penalty (the company’s “administrative transference costs”).

You’re a reasonably responsible person, but easy credit and constant expenses keep you perpetually over-extended. Your kids are obsessed with brand-name consumer goods -- shoes, jackets, wristwatches -- and are convinced that if you care about them you’ll keep them provided with these things. They have a point, since such items serve as critical status symbols that they need to achieve peer acceptance and avoid social and physical abuse.

Your safety cushion -- at best four months’ living expenses -- has you losing sleep. When you lose your home, you have no rights. You fall into the anarchic milieu of the poverty class, where they’ll take away your kids on the basis that you can’t provide for them.^[1]

A four-month cushion isn’t much, considering the difficulties of getting a job. Employers don’t like troublemakers who quit, and they don’t need you much anyhow. With communications technology, most jobs can be done practically anywhere on earth. And if you gave notice, your circumstances would tighten immediately. Personnel systems automatically notify creditors of such events, with the result that rates are jacked-up due to increased risk.

You’re stressed from lack of sleep. Someone in the neighborhood likes to play high-volume recordings in the middle of the night of men and women screaming in agony -- it’s top of the charts, by a popular group called Death Throes. You dare not call the police. One neighbor who did suffered a concussion when the cops came to his house and smashed his head against the wall. You don’t mess with cops if you don’t have a lot of money for defense lawyers. Cutbacks in the court system have made wrongful convictions routine. It’s easy to end up in prison, subject to high-tech torture for the amusement of underpaid guards.^[2]

Though you’re trapped, you’d like your kids to have a better life. But it’s clear to you their school’s barely teaching anything. Most time is spent in thinly disguised corporate brand loyalty building exercises.^[3] Since you’re not important -- middle class, no political connections, no access to media -- the school authorities don’t return your calls. As for your elected representatives, trying to reach them means spending an hour listening to the monotonous repetition of that stock phrase, “Your call is very important to us, please wait.” On one occasion when you did persist, a kid who sounded like he hadn’t completed high school finally came on the line. He couldn’t understand what you were talking about, and he had a surly attitude. But you had to be careful. One angry remark gets you branded as a potential terrorist. Once your profile has a checkmark in that column, you’re a suspect in every crime and are considered fair game for continual police harassment.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other such groups are still around, but nobody takes them seriously. The media portrays them as a bunch of misfits, and after a string of highly publicized judicial defeats, they’re regarded as irrelevant. Although the very thought of politics makes most people angry and disgusted, the challenges of daily life are all-consuming.

Some parents think highly of the education their kids are getting. They’ve swallowed whole the ad campaigns claiming that test scores prove this to be the best-educated generation. You know this is false but without money, your view makes no difference.

You can accept deprivation. You just wish you could hope for a better future. But you don’t see how that’s possible ... in America.

The above is not a forecast. I offer it as a possible consequence of failure to achieve social and political reform.

 

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[1] “Strict Shelter Rules Force Many Families Out,” The New York Times, November 29, 1999, describes the expulsion of homeless people from shelters because of bureaucratic errors, and the policy of taking away their kids if they can find no alternative shelter.

[2] See “Cruelty in Control? The Stun Belt and Other Electro-Shock Equipment in Law Enforcement,” an Amnesty International report of June 8, 1999 that discusses the use of shock technology in U.S. prisons and courts (available at Amnesty International publications and news releases on the U.S.A.).

[3] “Schools With a Slant,” The New York Times, August 21, 1999, an Op-Ed piece by a high school teacher in Salem, Ore., reports: “at least 234 corporations are now flooding the public schools with films, textbooks and computer software under the guise of ‘instructional material.’ A lesson in self-esteem sponsored by Revlon includes an investigation of ‘good and bad hair days.’ In a history lesson, Tootsie Rolls are touted as a part of soldiers’ diets during World War II. Exxon provides a video on the Valdez spill playing down its ecological impact. And Chevron, in a lesson for use in civics or science classes, reminds students that they will soon be able to vote and make ‘important decisions’ about global warming, which the company then rebuts as incomplete science.... To teach the ‘scientific method,’ the Campbell Soup Company once distributed free lesson plans and demonstration kits. The ‘Slotted Spoon Test’ compared the thickness of Campbell’s product, Prego, against a competitor, Ragu. The young scientists were to find Prego to be thicker; if not, they simply did the lab incorrectly.”