MacArthur's Freehold

Chapter 77

Chapter 77 -- EWYBDETMVKZMUXTKAZ

Carter opened his eyes in a still dark room, lying quietly, all his senses on alert. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw Jessica was sitting on the edge of the bed. That was what had awakened him - she rarely if ever awoke before he did.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

She turned, lay back down beside him, her head against his shoulder and a hand on his chest. After a while she spoke.

"I guess it is. Isn't it." she said. "My head tells me so, everything says yes, it's over now. You can rest for a while. But is it, really?"

"It's never really over." he said. "I hope it goes the way it seems to be, and continues until we're where the Council will be satisfied. If it does, then I'd say things are pretty good. And at this point, unless I'm missing something big. I believe it will.

"But as for being over - that will never happen. All we can do is roll it back as far as we can and try to keep it there for a while. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of liberty."

"You think it will go back to the way it was, where the government is concerned, two hundred, even a hundred years ago?" Jessica asked.

"To think we can go back to the beginning, I think, would be unrealistic" he said. "But a hundred years - that would take us back to the 1920s, 1930s. That wasn't such a bad time, compared to now. We were seeing the beginnings of problems - income tax, the Federal Reserve, powerful labor unions existed but the full effect of them was not yet felt. If we could go back that far and apply what we've learned, that would would be good."

"I wonder if we can even do that" Jessica said. "We're counting on the most corrupt and inept people to do what is right, even when shown how."

"Yeah" he said. "The only reason they'll do it is because there's a gun to their collective heads. So they'll do what they have to do to survive for the moment."

"While counting on being able to start reversing the reforms at the earliest opportunity. I wonder how we prevent that, or if we can."

"Well, one of the key elements is election reform. The reason everything went south so fast was that they had complete control of system. Every election of any consequence was decided in advance. I believe if elections are made honest again, they may never win another presidential election. Which is what they had in mind for their opposition."

"That does give me some hope." she said. "I guess for some reason I'm more worried now than before, when I should be optimistic. Maybe it's the enormity of the whole thing. It's hard to wrap my head around it."

"Well, it is the biggest thing since the founding" he said. "Literally. We were threatened in maybe one war, in reality. And then the cold war could have gone badly, but it didn't because we weren't this far gone yet. We are, essentially, starting over."

"You don't think there's a chance it can be reversed, by force, now?"

"I believe that is pretty much as improbable as anyone can calculate. The result would be a resumption of hostilities, and a few cycles of that would leave the country in ruins. Balkanized, central government irrelevant or non-existent. I expect they'll play along, planning to regroup and restart the campaign when the time is right."

"That won't be in our lifetime" she said. "Will it?"

"I doubt it. They'll be wrangling over this for some time, years probably. As long as we're making progress they can't start to reverse it."