Warning - Refers To The Universe Outside Woodbury

Tipping Points
As the Second Millennium ended, America - and the world - had reached a number of tipping points.

The Soviet Union had collapsed under its own weight and the world found itself under the influence of one single superpower. One that was both generally benign and possessed of an armed might greater than that of all of history’s previous major powers combined.

The tide had been turned on our mounting national debt and for the first time in a generation we had run a surplus not a deficit.

A new enemy to civilization was just beginning to reach out across the world from Arabia.

Science continued increasing the pace at which breakthroughs in medicine and technology were being achieved.

Man’s eons-long war against nature - a seemingly impossible exercise a mere century ago - was, horrifyingly, being won. And it was beginning to dawn on us that we had not merely tamed the planet, but were, in fact, killing it.

Our dependence on petroleum as our primary source of energy was not only having disastrous effects on our environment but also holding us hostage both to a cartel of the most regressive regimes on the planet and to a doomed technology based on a dwindling resource. A resource which, we are learning, is invaluable as a raw material for manufacture but which, instead, we are burning at an ever increasing rate in a manner little different than fueling our fireplaces with irreplaceable works of art.

And just as we reached this fulcrum in history, an unbelievable series of chance events and the choices of a handful of corrupt officials and the intervention by a feckless Supreme Court majority, had seen to it that America was to be governed by the worst possible President at the worst possible moment. A man whose intellectual laziness was indistinguishable from utter stupidity. A man whose lip service to religiosity was as close as he was capable of getting to any sense of morality or ethics.

And so this man became President just at the moment when choices could have been made to begin reversing the damage we were doing to the environment; to continue our long climb out of debt; to lead the world in a better direction: to create a global consensus to counter terrorism in a viable way. And, instead, this President made disastrous choice after disastrous choice.

Under this President, science, medicine and technology were subordinated to a fundamentalist Christian Know-Nothingism which became the new Inquisition. Medical decisions, already hampered in this country, were further usurped by preachers, politicians and insurance industry con-men.

Our schools had to battle to teach established, scientific fact. Our libraries not only had to face a wave of politically empowered, self-righteous book burners, but were ordered to become arms of our state security system. The Surgeon General, the Head of NASA, and others, had to rewrite scientific reports to meet the demands of the political apparatchiks installed in their offices.

Agency after agency was gutted as able civil servants were replaced by politically connected incompetents. FEMA went from being a superbly run operation to being a national dirty joke. The Justice Department, squandered a two-century-old reputation of professionalism. The EPA knowingly let rescue workers at ground zero destroy their health. The FDA put politics above policy. Regulation and oversight were cut back in department after department. Public safety gave way to private profit and political expediency.

Soon we will have a new President. And he or she will be faced with a nightmarish list of problems: a National Debt which will have soared from 5 trillion dollars to more than twice that already unimaginable figure; the increasing threat of irrational nihilism spreading like a virulent disease under the banner of fundamentalist Islam: an American army, sapped by the pointless war in Iraq, requiring perhaps a generation to rebuild - and this while the actual terrorist threat has grown unchecked; a federal bureaucracy from which honest men and women fled; a world which now looks upon America with fear and disgust.

Soon we will have a new President. Soon, but far too late.