I went to bed last night just a little troubled by blogger warnings that the supercollider experiment would go horribly wrong and cause the Earth to be consumed by a black hole.
I awoke this morning very much alive, the Earth apparently still in one piece. Yet, I am troubled by something that I can only describe as a warp between what was my yesterday and what is my today.
You see, when I went to bed last night, John Kerry was the President of the United States in a heated reelection bid with John McCain after having defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary. Former President George Bush the junior and his Vice-President Richard Cheney had fled the country for Paraguay where efforts to extradite them to the Hague for war crimes had been stymied. With the retirement of Clarence Thomas, Kerry had appointed Barack Obama to the United States Supreme Court, where he was instrumental in the upholding of sentences handed down by the lower courts against the Diebold 5, the CEO and his chief officers of Blackwater, Inc, Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch.
Ken Lay was arrested when he sneaked into the US from Paraguay, rumors of his death greatly manufactured. Vice-President John Edwards had just visited my little town to cut the ribbon on our new water treatment facility.
The Republicans in the senate (minority by 6) had filibustered the Kennedy/Dodd Heathcare Reform Bill that would have, if passed, outlawed for-profit insurers and rolled Heath Care into a single-provider government entity paid for with a 2 per cent increase in payroll taxes and raising the ceiling to 42 per cent tax on incomes over 500,000 dollars a year.
And jobs were coming back to the United States after the President signed the Economic National Security Act that eliminated the tax breaks of corporations with more than 28 per cent of their workforces headquartered overseas, and barring import of consumer goods from those manufacturers not having at least one operating physical plant in the United States.
The Department of Energy, with funds previously allocated to the terminated Department of Homeland Security, has issued billions of dollars to research and development under the President’s goal of making the nation energy independent by the year 2020. Already the investment has paid off with solar cells that mimic plant photosynthesis energy storage, cheap and efficient in cost and utility.
And when I went to bed last night, there were no for sale signs on the front lawns of any house in my neighborhood. Now they are all over the place. And on my front door is taped a foreclosure notice from Wells Fargo, though yesterday I had paid as due. And when I went to my place of work, I was escorted away by a lone security guard who clearly thought me crazy to expect to work at a plant that had closed and furloughed all employees 5 years ago.
My wife and kids? Where are they? They were here yesterday.
Please help me! I’ve fallen into a black hole and I can’t get out!