FAR Future, Episode 71: When Johnny (and Kim, Serena, and Rene) Come Marching Home

Just because it’s Groundhog Day doesn’t mean I’ll be posting the same thing every day from now on…

Sunday, April 30, 2023
When Johnny (and Kim, Serena, and Rene) Come Marching Home

There’s some major downsizing going on with the military now that the Reunification is over. Kim and Serena were due to be cut loose anyway, but Rene got out a year early. Ironically, they stop-loss’ed Kim for 30 days to help with the mopping-up in Dallas, which gave Serena time to get over here on the boat, and all three of them met up in Atlanta on Thursday. They took the RoadTrain together, catching up with each other, and Christina and I met them at the stop in the old retail district. Kim and Christina had, shall we say, a joyful reunion… I offered to get them a hotel room and come back for them later, but they both wanted to get home. (Can’t blame Kim for that.) She insisted he show her the scar from the riot; it’s healed up of course but it’s still kind of ugly. He joked about getting a tattoo around it, but Christina did a very convincing imitation of Daughter Dearest and threatened great bodily harm if he did. “Yes, dear.” Smart guy.

Rene and Serena have the same mutual respect they’ve always had for each other, but now it’s an adult version. They’ve never been attracted to each other the way Kim and Christina (still) are, but they’ve always been best friends. The three of us batted things around on the way home, while the other two mostly took in each other. Rene is still pretty reticent about what he’d been up to, although he was able to say he, the major, and Sammy T defected from the junta and started listening in on their comms. Manny went to RoT, and presumably he got swept up in the amnesty (if he survived). Major Shevchuk, he said, was acting strange ever since they left Saudi… maybe PTSD. Rene and Kim both say they’re OK, and Serena is fine since she didn’t see any fighting anyway.

Not really much to say about the end of the Reunification — it was your basic street fight, block by block, building by building. I’m glad Kim wasn’t involved in the fighting. The rulers tried to keep the Rotter troops going, while they made a run for it themselves. They might have gotten away if they hadn’t used a helicopter; the noise attracted attention and the army just followed them until they ran out of fuel and had to land. They were the three televangelists that were running things from inside, and a few other high-level militia types. I dug around and found out that General Mayhem and Sgt. Pepper were killed in the fighting. :-( Col. Mustard survived and accepted the “amnesty” program: he has to do some jail time and stay out of the oil business and politics for the rest of his life. As for the televangelists — both the ones in Dallas at the time and the two aiding things from outside — I don’t know if they’ll ever get out of prison. I know their assets were seized; I wonder if they’ll do what they did to Robert E. Lee and turn their estates into cemeteries.

Now that the war’s over, I guess I can safely say that I got a “visit” from some FBI people earlier in the year, checking up on my junta connections. Just being an officer in a church is enough to make you a suspect now to begin with, but that little trip to Nickajack made me doubly suspect. Amazingly enough, they had an entire printed copy of my blog… all the way back to 2005! (Good Lord, my blog is old enough to vote?) It was much of what made for a rather thick file the junta had on me. Even using nicknames for everyone, I guess someone managed to link me and the blog… I always figured someone could make the connections if they wanted to badly enough. They told me I’d be getting an entire copy of my file pretty soon, to comply with the Personal Data Ownership Act, and then they’d destroy everything but the tax records. What it came down to was, did the blog reflect my real thoughts or was it a front? I was tagged by the junta as a “D0,” aka Dissident, Threat Level Zero (aka all talk), but that could have been part of the cover in their thinking. They left satisfied… at least I hope they did. Harboring the Cardenas family probably helped with that — as well as The Boy being shipped to the shale mines (another thing I didn’t dare mention before now). He’s been around some, but spends a lot of time down at the pasture keeping an eye on the cattle. I just hope nobody tries to steal a cow while he’s down there… I think he’d enjoy giving a junta-symp the 3 S’s.

Our church pianist works in a tax firm, and she hasn’t been to church in the last few weeks — they changed the tax code so that donations to churches (and charities) can only be written off in proportion to the percentage of money they actually disburse outside the organization, and the IRS had to extend the filing date to May 15 to give everyone a chance to figure out their donations. That’s going to whack a lot of churches, and (I hope) put an end to the charities that pocket most of the donations they get. Most churches, especially the small ones like ours, use pretty much everything they take in to keep the doors open. The mega-churches have a little more leeway, but I bet their members are going to take a really hard look at how much their preacher(s) pocket from now on… especially when they start telling everyone to kick in some more. Then again, a lot of those preachers have either been arrested for aiding and abetting the junta (aka treason, but they’re steering clear of that word so far) or are under some very close scrutiny. I doubt that being a Penitent church is going to give us any kind of lenient treatment… if it did, all the wing-y churches would claim to be Penitent too, just for the tax breaks. It’s really a shame, how those people — whether directly connected to the junta or just Satan’s Little Helpers – corrupted so many churches for their personal and political gain. Now we’ll all be paying for it, as soon as we can figure out the percentages. I’m just going to assume my donations won’t be tax-deductible from now on.

Interestingly enough, I haven’t seen any video or other missives from The Prophet the last couple of months. I hope he’s OK.

continued…