They put the liberal against the wall and shot them. There were reports that this man had been collaborating with journalists, and that they had used family connections to infiltrate the inner circle of the West Wing, in order to leak information. It had personally offended the President, and he was the one who had steamrollered over everyone to make sure that this person was answered with a bullet.
Some of the sanctuary states were reported to be on the verge of collapse, but in truth, their isolated and embargoed economies seemed to be benefitting from the dissociation with the sitting President. Since the 22nd Amendment had been repealed, and lifetime Presidency had become a reality, the notion of sanctuary states had taken a dramatic shift, and some aw them as bastions of free speech, and carriers of the torch for true American values.
Pieter Delay, as a leader in the People First movement, and deliverer of medication to those who had been dying for lack of it, was a figurehead seen to rival the Presidency, which had record lows for approval ratings. It was said that the idea that there were two Americas had become more real in recent years, and that lines were being drawn along state lines, and in some cases along city boundary lines. Pieter was thought to draw these disparate groups together.
The umbrella of the so-called Evolving Civil Rights Movement had come to encompass so many things – gender, pay-gap, race … anything that marked someone as an underdog, or being on the outside. Juno Parker was head and shoulders above everyone else in the arena, like Angela Davis, and Huey Newton combined, and with the singing voice of Nina Simone, and she, together with Pieter Delay, were rumoured to be considering a run on the White House.
The pretense of democracy was strong. It had become much easier to find out which people in which electoral college belonged to which PAC or which special interest group, despite what the Governmental Gaslighting Division tried to get out there as the main story. Tame Press versus real journalists named as Fake Press, and only those who had the wherewithal to chase down the truth could differentiate between the two.
National Guards seemed to split down the middle too – were you OK firing gas canisters into the midst of politically engaged youngsters and mothers, or were you wrapped in the tainted flag of an administration that felt force was the only way to ensure the survival of a notion of the country that was truly only as strong as it was a shared idea.
People outside the country looked on and wondered how long a slow motion car-crash could take? It was like watching the unveiling of series of pictures by Andy Warhol where the freezeframes of sensationalist detail could be turned out endlessly on a factory line.
The joke was made that they had put in a sewage line from the subconscious of the President and that the overflow washed over the whole nation. One shared idea might not have been in vogue, but the stream of constant brain-farts churned out through that pipe was something everyone got to enjoy. Was the polluted future a truth, or just a desired nightmare? Who knew anymore?