She always wanted to live in California … but not like this. Weather is, more often than not, picture perfect with the sea on one side and mountains on the other—ideal for the vast fruited fields where she now works as slave labor. The fresh smell of grass and earth always lifted her spirit as long as she could remember, going back to riding backseat with the car windows down in late fall or early spring heading home from visiting relatives in the country.
Field work is hard on the body, mind numbing and then dehumanizing. At first she cried, having lost everything except her heartbeat. She was healthy, so she was put to work. She thought of breaking free but knew she’d be shot. She decided biding her time was the only way until her health gives out.
She works in solitude, the only sounds beside nature are from a loudspeaker when AI permits her at nightfall to return to her hut for rest until the morning alarm an hour before daybreak.
All her life, she had had a big mouth. Not diplomatic, her mother would say as a character flaw and warning. She had grown accustomed to saying whatever was on her mind because she was American, an old American, not like the new Americans who took over the country with little bloodshed. The new Americans had the guns and the bullets. Old Americans like her didn’t believe in owning a gun not even for protection let alone a political regime change like the coup.
Free speech used to be a right in old America. So did the human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the regime took over, American rights were removed one by one. The first batch dealt with women: no right to abortion, only the right to procreate, no college education, no career, no bank account, no home ownership, no living alone, no being single, no dating. The former rights were removed almost silently and with relatively little protest by most Americans–but she protested. Public protests, only in the largest metropolitan centers, drew scant numbers in comparison with the nation’s majority who fully supported the regime and its many changes.
Anyone who protested was marked as a traitor to the country. America was no longer the Land of the Free. Late one night, her apartment was raided. She was dragged out of bed in the dark, gagged, eyes taped shut, head stuffed in sackcloth, arms yanked behind, wrists and ankles zipped together, guns felt at her head and heart. She was removed and thrown into a van with others. She could feel their bodies. When the doors slammed shut, everyone fiercely tried to get out of their bonds. But it was impossible.
The drive was very long over a period of a few days. No breaks or food or water. The driver’s windows must have been down because she could smell the transition from city to rural land and sometimes feel a faint breeze and smell rain then the ocean.
It seemed so long ago, but life as she knew it was destroyed in one month. Now she gets back to work. Any defiance is not tolerated. Gunshots echo across the terrain every day. She wants to live or survive. How long will this godless America last, she wonders silently in her mind.
Experiment in democracy
She was educated, what the former president-now-demagogue calls over educated, meaning useless. Educators were first to replace all removed undocumented workers across the former U.S., reportedly 20 million people. She felt fortunate not to have been sent to work in a slaughterhouse. Everyone in New America was born here and could prove it. Her home state of Texas quickly fell in line, if not in love, with the regime that banned protests against the new government. It was just as well that she was taken from everything she once claimed: career, home, car, spiritual books, knickknacks and photographs only meaningful to her. Texas had grown unbearably hot by weather and politics—too extreme to the right of a once semi-balanced government, when both sides knew how to compromise. In recent years, she could count on one hand friends and family who shared her pure democratic American views, the ones enshrined in the original Constitution dating back to the 18th century. That precious fragile document and all copies were destroyed as the regime’s supporters—two hundred million Americans—celebrated.
That day of celebration, viewed live on devices and old TVs, was a gathering of the ignorant, she thought. Probably said it out loud. The movement was part of the original coup from 2021 when opponents of the former newly elected U.S. president barged into the capitol and took over the legislative chambers, fully prepared to hang any enemy who interfered as they created a new government.
The transition was almost silent across the nation. For decades Americans bellyached about voting, how much trouble it was, not knowing what to do as modernization changed voting machines. So the new regime took away thousands of polling places across the nation and did away with mail-in ballots. Most Americans, those of the TV age, made clear they didn’t vote anymore anyway, didn’t see the point, wished for one charismatic leader—someone who would say what they wanted to say and felt just like they did: put out with what they called ‘woke’ thinking and attitudes and views that were deemed ‘politically incorrect.’ And what they wanted to say and what they always thought was white people, and particularly white males, were getting the short end of the stick. Their hot shot leader told them what they wanted to hear, what they had been thinking all along. Their problems were with affirmative action, women’s rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, and then gay rights. They thought they were being passed over one too many times. Their paychecks were shrinking, their opportunities gone, as women and racial and ethnic minorities were given a leg up in job consideration and even college admission.
The new regime would fix all that.
Cities were under martial law, so crime was virtually a thing of the past. And everyone, really a small percent of the former Americans, who did not believe in the eternal leader were removed. Other leaders who spoke against the new leader were silenced one way or another; one way was their mysterious deaths, always in secret, like being thrown from the 40th-floor balcony or more sinister like being poisoned. No court or media existed to challenge the regime. Even the few tech leaders, who maintained most of the money on the planet, were more than happy to oblige the new American regime.
So human rights were a thing of the past in new America and history rewritten—another aspect the regime whitewashed: museums, history books, historical documentaries, and even the internet. Few new Americans were granted access to the internet.
The vast majority of new Americans were just fine with how the regime and perpetual leader changed things. Slave labor fixed a lot of problems with supply and demand. Allegiance was hardly worth fighting against. And the most important followers were the youth. They never knew another time of total freedom: a 250-year era of everyone in America living, thinking and believing the way each wanted—exchanging ideas, lifestyles, and philosophies in striving toward what the Ancients termed the Good Life.
The lesson in governing humanity is ancient yet never learned or understood by modern Americans. Freedom isn’t free, though these very words were on their car bumpers. All people are created equal. Knowledge is power. Ignorance is bliss. Government power should be balanced and checked by three equal branches: executive, legislative and judicial. No one political party should remain in power forever. The political pendulum swings left and right and never rests in the middle—and this is because societies evolve as people change often for the better. Absolute power corrupts. And always, always, suppressed people with nothing to lose will rise up and overthrow a mad king.