A Glimpse Into the Future

Posted by Andrew Tobolowsky on 03.24.2009

As Through a Glass With Your Tongue in Your Cheek

The future as we guess it:

Option 1: Obama leads the nation to peace and prosperity. Having made the right moves to guide us through the economic failures, his incredibly ambitious budget and conciliatory foreign policy turn out to be a brilliant example of talent and self-confidence guiding the country where it didn't even know it could go. We are uplifted. Having cut our reliance on foreign energy sources by stimulating the development of alternative energy, America's much more free to make reasonable diplomatic choices than when it couldn't piss off the Middle East entirely. Having agreed to talk to many who would otherwise have been our enemies, while refusing to relax vigilance at home and abroad, he has created a nation which is at least nearly as safe as it was with torture and detention camps AND much less likely to be the target of a threat in the first place. Health care and school reform allows money that was at one time sort of thrust clumsily in their general direction to be targeted and thereby reduced. Science, of which Obama is a great friend, prospers. Stem cell research soon offers cures for some of the most intractable medical problems in the world. This, too, reduces health care cost. His determination to cut what he sees as fat from the budget rather than what other less-educated people think results in a government that can do most of the things it SHOULD do and doesn't try to do so much of what it shouldn't. Women are free to choose abortion, both legally and without moral pressure, but thanks to the spread of education on the subject of birth control, they find themselves wanting to much less often. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Rudy Giuliani get together to sign a testimonial "thanks for showing us the error of our ways, big O". Rush Limbaugh and Nancy Pelosi, realizing they more or less deserve each other, get married. They celebrate their nuptials on a large crate of oxycontin. In deference to their differing views, the first child is aborted and the second sent to Liberty University.

Option 2: America is a burning wasteland. Obama spent too much and other countries stopped buying our debt. The urge to look forward even in crisis has ruined not only the programs that were being advanced but the ones already in place—now nothing works and we don't have the cash or resources to fix it. Our refusal to operate continually under the threat of force to other nations has enabled nations like Iran and North Korea to basically get away with whatever they wanted. Terrorists, released from Guantanamo without a plan, go back to their countries. With their tales of the things they endured and the scars they have to show, recruitment swells. Obama keeps saying these are our friends, these are our friends—but they are not. The economy took the military with it. Funding for proper defense went to fetus harvesting. I literally just ate one of my kids. Just cold ate him. Obama's stunning reversal in popularity leads to the biggest swing in public opinion in history. If Liberals are the sometimes unnecessary conscience of conservatism, the elections of 2010 and 2012 usher in a government completely without conscience. But it's far, far too late. Children rut in the decaying streets for which there is no money to repair. All babies that are not aborted are born gay. An interstate highway bridge collapse makes headlines as killed in the calamity are two gay babies who were having sex. Sarah Palin appears in her true form, a giant lizard monster, and rampages through New York despite the best efforts of Mothra and Matthew Broderick (what, I can't have ONE Sarah Palin joke?). The finishing touch to America as a nation worth worrying about occurs when President Jindal removes all funding for Volcano Monitoring, and DC is buried in layer after layer of hot ash. Just to rub it in, Iran and N. Korea fire fully functional nuclear weapons—some of which are found to have been shipped their by Saddam Hussein as the American troops moved in. Taliban forces occupy Oregon, for some reason. Millions of liberals caught in the cataclysm come back as shades or ghouls, forced to go door to door in their haunting, begging forgiveness for having destroyed civilization as we know it. They are only allowed into heaven after Limbaugh gives them the kiss of peace.

What a high stakes Presidency!