FAR Future, Episode 70: Not a Bang, but a Whimper

A while back, Yooper pointed out that the “FAR Future” is not even 15 years from now. It’s like that Don Hendley song, In a New York minute, everything can change. Sounds implausible, even… FARfetched? [sorry, couldn’t resist] But things elsewhere have changed even faster and more drastically, even in modern history: Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984 and was Hell on Earth by 1993.

Monday, March 6, 2023
Not a Bang, but a Whimper

The Final-We-Hope-Offensive is underway. The Rotters have been pushed out of Fort Worth and Grapevine, and the airport is no longer surrounded. Fort Worth fell so quickly that some thought perhaps the Rotters had been bluffing all along, but Arlington was the other think coming. They might not have much of an air force (a few choppers), or more armor than what they were able to loot from the TX National Guard, but they do have artillery and trained (and motivated) grunts. Lots of ex-army and ex-Marines, some of them active duty until late last year. It doesn’t help that our side is trying to minimize the ever-euphemistic “collateral damage” (i.e. “oops, we scrogged some civilians”), and the Rotters know that, and are taking advantage. The air force will still splatter an artillery placement in some neighborhood even if the explosion takes out a few houses, but they try really hard not to miss and follow up with fire-suppression choppers. But if we try not to damage people’s houses, the Rotters try not to damage the freeways. That gives the good guys an advantage too… we have tanks placed on their southern flank (I-20), and eastern and northern flanks (I-635) — blocking major in/out routes, and they’re not taking any artillery fire.

As they did in Houston, the Guard is in Fort Worth to heal various battle scars and get the lights back on. If the Rotters have electricity now, they’re generating their own… one of the first things a reunified neighborhood gets is electricity, and that makes most of the people there pretty happy to be back in the USA. The broadcast TV is being jammed right now; the self-styled Minister of Moral Values was clogging up all the Dallas stations anyway, exhorting people to fight on for the glorious “Christian Republic” and (worse) recommending stuff like “all Christians across America who support the traditional values taught by the Bible are to rise up and take their country back.” I guess they can still exhort their grunts on cable, but at least the real world is left out of it. I think they were saying something about re-opening a station in Fort Worth, but maybe they’ll just have the cable on there too.

Kim’s still in Tulsa. He called us on Friday for his normal chat with Christina and the rest of us. Mrs. Fetched asked him if things were getting any better there, and to our surprise he said they were. “I went into a coffee shop yesterday to get our morning joe,” he said, “and a couple of the locals were in there talking with the barista. They let me get my order in, then one of them offered to help me carry it out. He said the preacher asked them in a prayer meeting that if God wanted the Rotters to win, why are they losing? So maybe things are starting to look up.”

Amazingly enough, I got an email from Col. Mustard over the weekend too:

Typing this on a cellphone. Dont know if youll get it or not. I guess you know whats going on down here. Me and a couple of the guys were talking about Nickajack last night, and we were joking about getting you down here to film the final battle. They probably wont let you in though, haha. I know you didnt support us, but hope youll pray for us anyway. You were an ok guy. Got a war to fight, hope Ill see you again.

Yeah, we all said a prayer for them, and I emailed him back saying we did pray for them and I hoped to see him as well. We also prayed that their leaders will come to their senses and surrender, but I didn’t bother telling him that — he probably knows. Heck, for that matter, he might just be hoping for the same thing himself. Like I said, those guys weren’t stupid, even if they had some far-out ideas about how things work (or should work). I hope the guys I was with that day are all smart enough to stay alive. But when I showed Mrs. Fetched the message, she looked at me and said, “You’re not thinking about it, are you?” I wasn’t… at least for more than a couple seconds, anyway. 64 is too old for that kind of stuff.

Farming is getting to be a reasonable way to make a living again. We’ve already taken enough orders to account for all the herbs we plan to grow this year. We’ve got our own garden started in cold frames… and wouldn’t you know it, Mrs. Fetched has a flock of chickens again. At least it’s only a dozen or so, a few layers and a few broilers, instead of 80,000. And a rooster to keep them reproducing. We had to fence in a place for them, because the dogs kept wanting to chew on them. At least we can move the fence around; we have them in the garden beds now where they can scratch out the weeds and eat all the bugs (and fertilize it). We’ll probably have to move them in a couple of weeks and let the poop mellow with age.

Heh. If things had gone the way everyone expected them to (i.e. endless growth), I’d be retiring this year. I gave up on retirement long ago, but with Guillermo and Maria to help, it’s not terribly hard work. But we’re all getting older, and Christina’s work is too important to throw it all on her, so we’ll probably have to get some younger faces in here eventually. Maybe Kim and Rene will take over once they get out of the army.

continued…