THIS IS one of those doomsday columns at which we scoff. Hang it on your wall, and in four years check to see if I'm right.
In four years, the Bush administration will have privatized Social Security and ended Medicaid. The debt will increase in direct proportion to the magnitude of increases in military spending and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest individuals. In fact, by the end of tax restructuring, corporations and millionaires will pay no taxes at all, beyond at most a "flat tax" designed to maximize revenue extracted from the poor.
The poor, in return, will get more prisons in which they can contemplate the utter lack of economic opportunity that will cause the crime rate to increase steadily and relentlessly. We will return to a society in which upwards of half of all African Americans live in poverty, a situation that has not existed since the implementation of Johnson's Great Society. Poverty overall as defined by current standards will increase too, a trend that will magnify itself as the Bush administration wages war on that last vestige of responsible government, the public school system.
The West Bank will resemble the Bantustans created by South Africa's apartheid government. The walls and "bypass highways" that Ariel Sharon is constructing today will completely isolate three or four pockets of Palestinians which will lack access to wells or farmland, and thus have to purchase such commodities from the Israelis. Terrorism in Israel will increase in direct proportion to the efficacy of Israel's attempted elimination of the Palestinian people.
In America, we will experience a similar phenomenon. As the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan continue under the auspices of symbolically democratic, actually puppet regimes, members of those societies, lacking a means by which to effect nonviolent change, will attack us, providing the administration with a rationale to further erode the Bill of Rights. Nostalgic "Moderates" will call for a return to the days of centrism, when the PATRIOT Act only obliterated the Fourth Amendment. Yet, as we examine our butchered Bill of Rights, we can take solace in the fact that enough oil is under Iraq to preclude the need to colonize any other countries any time soon. Nor will attacks on other countries be necessary to distract the populace from the suffering at home, for ongoing terrorist attacks and the administration's "tough" reactions thereto will serve nobly as an excuse for the maintenance of the military industrial complex and the end of social services.
And will we storm the Bastille? Will Laura Bush offer us cake? Will we execute Ken Lay and Dick Cheney in a modern Star Chamber? No. Satisfied with our victory over the twin scourges of abortion and equality for homosexuals, we will exult in the death of each terrorist, while offering heartfelt consolation to the mothers of sons who die for our idiocy. On our white horse, we will wage an endless war against the Muslim forces of darkness, who can only be motivated by a profound hatred for freedom, Christianity and our selfless devotion to their liberation. Dick Cheney will lead the charge into battle, no doubt, with Bush directly behind.
This is no mere stream to cross. We at no point can expect to change leaders if we expect to fulfill our particular version of apocalypse. And that does not mean we can't vote for Bill Frist or Rudy Guiliani in 2008. The name matters not at all, but rather the function of a dignitary to preside over the concentration of wealth, political and military power in multinational corporations and the Republican administrations over whom they exercise complete control.
This is not only a dawn of an empire to last a thousand years, but also the death of an idea, the idea that we as students, as individuals, have some impact over the direction of our country, of our world; for as this election has shown us, the corporations who own the media, the military and the Bush administration have increasingly complete control over roughly half of the voters. And though we do not have power over this hegemony, we are nonetheless culpable if we run off to the Mediterranean coast to escape our insane empire because our parentsand grandparents will remain in America, watching their social services evaporate as their sons and daughters either die in an endless war or flee in acknowledgment that the American people committed national suicide on Nov. 2, 2004.
Zack Fields is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.
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