I am writing from the future. I am your grand-child and I live in a cage. The cage is made of fiberglass constructed from the America First company. In fact, the iron faucet, the plastic door, the steel which supports my cage within the complex of hundreds of thousands of cages in the Omaha District, the water which arrives in 1/2 liter increments every six hours and the IV drip which provides the antidote to the toxins in the water, allowing me to survive while also necessitating my confinement, are all provided by the America First company.
The America First Company is run by Baron Trump. It has been a family run entity since President Trump privatized all public services and leased them to the America First company run by his sons. That was when he used the tax code to force the energy companies, communications companies and news corporations to partner with America First or be penalized with 90% taxation. In the name of making them America First. Thus creating a monolith of a company which literally had control of, and a stake in, everything. Just as happened in Russia when Putin came to power.
We tell stories in the cages of an America before the America First company. Nostalgic rumors of scientists working to find cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s and even prevent the 105 heat index which ripples across the landscape from 4am till midnight. The oldest among us, those with that deep set sadness of a life misspent, tell of the time right before it happened. They speak of a Window. Like a science fiction fantasy they speak of it as some portal to another dimension.
That Window was the moment when Donald Trump first took power. When the laws of the Constitution could still have been enforced; when a separation between his political power and his business interest could have been brought to the light. They talk about how it was ‘all right there.’ The precedent, the law, the majority of the people. All of it demanded that his tax returns be shown and his business interests made public so America could keep it’s tradition of separating political power from personal power alive. From preventing rule by tyranny and thereby protecting the literal crux of the American Revolution.
They talk about how no one thought “it” could happen. Because ‘this was America’. They had forgotten that America had not always been. That most of history was a ‘not America’ landscape. That America was forged by the kind of people who rebelled against their own nation, who were traitors to British nationalism in favor of personal freedom. They forgot freedom was something that had to be maintained with vigor; they had taken it for granted. But the force which moves through history creating dictators and tyrants and despots and demagogues was not complacent, and this time America slept.
There is rumor of a list. A computer file kept in one of the more remote District Cages in Montana. A list of names. People who failed to protect America. People who had even the slightest bit of voice in the government and failed to act. People who waited until it was too late. Until their children died of lead poising from the massive fracking leaks. Until their pension disappeared in the America First capital drive of 2019 when all social security and medicare was privatized and turned over to America First – the board members of which now live on thousand acre ranches worked by Cage Workers like myself. Until the education system was stripped of everything but the history and virtue of the America First company and parents cried at night as their own kids berated and insulted them for knowing Shakespeare and Harry Potter and Newtonian Laws of Physics, all forbidden material, and there was nothing they could do because the kids knew to call Trump Tower Security if anyone spoke ill of America First. A giant chocolate bar for every adult they turned in.
We comfort ourselves with that list. That someday we will once again be free and all our suffering can be heaped upon those names. It is a sad way to live, with hate and revenge and anger the only pillars of self. But we have nothing else. Under the rule of America First there is no hope. There is no dreaming. There is only the cold comfort of perhaps one day righting the wrongs done to us. We have all taken a vow – that if one day the list is revealed and any of our own last names are on it we will sacrifice ourselves as penance.
I don’t know if you can hear me, I don’t know if this will get through. There is a spirit man who lives outside the cages, a descendent of the natives, who says it is possible. That perhaps this message could find its way back through time. I’m not sure if this is a warning or a cry for help, if you can do anything or if it’s already too late.
All I know is that if there’s anything you hold dear, if there is anything in your heart at all, now is the time to protect it. Now is the time to save America from the tyranny of Trump. And the way to do it is to return his power to the people – to make his business interests public, to release his tax returns. To maintain what the Founding Fathers started. From here it seems such a small thing to ask, an administrative mundanity, yet it holds the key to liberty itself.
As for myself, I am your grand-child. I write from the future. I live in a cage. And I hope our name is not on that list.