Future History Lesson #1
For the first quarter of the 21st Century, there were still only two political parties in the United States: the Democratic Party and the Un-democratic Party (formerly the Republican Party). These were marked by a few fundamental differences in their positions on the role of government. For example, the Democrats wanted to maintain elections as a means of determining things like representation and the leadership of the executive branch and believed improving the prospects for human life in the future by providing universal education and healthcare and by protecting clean air and water, while the Un-democrats were more concerned with arming the oppressed to defend themselves against massage parlor workers of Asian descent and paying judges to decide laws in favor of the corporate elite.
Fortunately for everyone, the Democratic Party, after toying far too long with the idea of allowing the Un-democrats to return the nation to pre-Civil War conditions, when slavery was legal and women didn’t have a say in anything, finally decided to heed the warnings of experts, scientists, and historians, and to listen to the 99% of the humanity (both domestic and foreign) who thought it would be a very bad idea to let the 1% dictate who would live and who would die (something a large swath of white supremacists couldn’t get behind at first because they hadn’t had their eyes checked for a long time — due, we now know, to lack of access to healthcare — and therefore believed that black people had scales and that the pepperoni on their pizzas was made of people parts). As a result of this sudden realization that they were actually supposed to do something in Congress, the Democrats stopped playing nice, tossed the filibuster, and finally got to work defending democracy — and people.
This event, the Great Awakening, averted a second civil war, saved the human race (and, some argue, life on Earth), and paved the way for the peace, prosperity, and pluralism we enjoy today.
In a footnote to this episode, historians recently unearthed a document created by the Un-democrats in the dying days of their once “grand old” party that revealed a desperate ploy to subvert progress in all areas of human rights in an impoverished and imperiled nation. It is a revision of the Preamble to the Constitution, the only part of that plan for government that they could alter without interference:
We the Powerful
of the United States, in Order to form a more preferential Union, regulate Justice, undermine domestic Tranquility, invite foreign interference, promote corporate Welfare, and exploit the Blessings of Liberty for ourselves -and our Posterity-[omit] , do dictate and enforce this Constitution for the United States of America.
(New evidence suggests they had plans to alter the Constitution itself, but only after removing pesky obstacles to achieving the hegemony to do so, including things like voting, literacy and due process.)
Lesson learned: it’s always a good day to wake up.
