South Chicagoland Young Democrats: The Blog

In honour of Fred Thompson throwing his name into the political maelstrom of the 2008 presidential election, I first will salute him for his bravery.  This is a turbulent time, what with the War on Terror and the subsequent rape of Islamic culture.  If the United States continues on the path that George W. Bush has set forth, if the USA remains in Iraq beyond the point of no return (which may very well have already passed) and if we continue to consume non-renewable resources at ever-increasing rates, then the world in twenty-five years will be a pitiful war-torn excuse for civilization.  On that positive note, I would like to announce that I am running for President of the United States in 2032.  I will be forty-two years old, one of the youngest to ever run.  Now, if you will humour me, the situation all candidates will be facing in 2032 unless something is done right now:

• Rising sea levels worldwide cause flooding of countless millions of people worldwide, but especially threatening to under-developed nations with large populations such as Bangladesh.  In the United States, Floridians have evacuated to Georgia and Alabama, while those from New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and countless other cities move inland.  Chicago becomes the capital of the United States.
• Peak Oil is old news, as stockpiles in the thawed Arctic Ocean are used up by 2015.  Millions of Chinese return to their bicycles, but most Americans can’t seem to leave their cars.  The non-renewable resources are extremely scarce, and so expensive as to be absurd.
• “Alternative” energy no longer exists.  There is no alternative to alternative energy, and solar farms become increasingly prevalent.  Entire cities place solar panels on top of their buildings, while nuclear reactors make up for what wind and solar cannot.
• NASA has fallen apart in favour of private companies for the American space program, but the Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and Japanese are surpassing the US in nearly every category.  The International Space Station is obsolete, while the Russians and Chinese jointly share a colony on the moon.  Asteroids are mined in a futile attempt to secure more resources for power. 
• International borders have collapsed due to increasing advances for the internet, making any sort of local government nearly ineffective.  In the US, elections are fraut with corruption and bribery, making present-day (2007) elections in countries like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela look as pure as the new-driven snow (by the way, snow is a distant memory, still present only in Antarctica, Siberia, and Greenland).
• The collapse of borders means people are flooding into the US and Europe, leaving Latin America, Turkey, Africa, and various other locales struggling to retain any sense of stability. 
• Wars come into being daily, as less people in the under-developed areas means an easier path to creating an empire, for those political leaders too inept or too apathetic to care about the rest of the world in favour of their own personal power.  In the developed “superpowers,” chaos reigns in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, England, and the US as the hordes of newcomers topple established methods and bring an abrupt end to what was once a stable society. 
• In the midst of the chaos and anarchy, highly intelligent thieves are able to sneak into the nuclear stockpiles of the US and Russia.  Several thermonuclear bombs explode over major cities, including Jerusalem.  No one really pays much attention, as each nation has much more important matters to attend to.
• The idea of a nation as a separate entity falls apart, as local governments are able to establish much better control in a chaotic world than the federal government.  This results in the fragmenting of much of the world, and a renaissance of the Dark Ages.

Isn’t that a wonderful picture?  It is the most extreme possibility I could imagine, though it would not be too difficult to imagine given how easily the internal societies can change when given drastic external changes, such as rising sea levels and the continued occupation of Iraq.  We cannot hold off the future, and we must do something right now to change this.  It certainly changes my campaign slogan (Driscoll is good for your Fiscal)- there would be no need for a solid fiscal year in such a situation as described above.  It remains to be seen how humanity will respond to these crises, but one thing is certain:  the only way to respond fully is to respond before the stimulus occurs.  Yet, on our present path, we may never respond.  (But it isn’t the first time a strong government denies the truth until it is no longer an issue.)

I feel sort of sorry for Fred Thompson.  He doesn’t realize what he’s getting himself into. 

~From the mind of Eamon Driscoll

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under International Politics, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.