One of the wonderful things about being a futurist and writer is that all you have to do is wait a couple of years and, if you’re any good, the folks who called you a lunatic will squirm and make excuses about the correct predictions you’ve made. As I said earlier in the commentary on the Lincoln Hall flood, I’ve been off promoting my book and courting my new wife, Kathi.  I’m back now, ready to kick ass and play Guitar Hero and my controller’s out of batteries.

Two years ago in September, I made a series of predictions about the state of the world over the forty years following 2007. If you new readers would like to review them now, they start with this one and continue through #6 published on September 12, 2007.  You might also refer to my short piece, Tom Predicts, which was written in March of that same year.

As with most predictions of the future, it turns out that the general trends were correct, but some specifics were missed by a mile.  Let’s take a look at how I’ve done so far:

1)  The Economy

Boy, I nailed this one.  It turns out that the recessions started six months later than I thought it would, but it was the sub-prime loans triggered by the sudden increase in fuel prices that threw us down the toilet.  The housing prices are down in the 40-50% loss range, foreclosures are at levels not seen since the Great Depression, and up to one thousand more banks may fail.  The stock market is showing a strong rally at this point, with the greatest six-month recovery since 1933.

2)  Politics and the Presidential Election

As I said in the introduction to the book version of these articles, I underestimated the ability of Hilary Clinton to self-destruct.  We have, however, a Democratic President elected by a wide coalition of voters.  He made history by being black, rather than a woman.  Hilary is still in the Executive Branch, just as the Secretary of State.  (I will give anyone who successfully predicted that in September of 2007 fifty dollars, btw.  They’re far better at this than I am.) 

The Democrats have a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof one in the Senate.  The Republicans are in total disarry with no clear leadership and in-fighting between the Evangelical, Blue-collar, Eastern Capitalist, and Libertarian factions.  There are already inkings of the Secessionist Movement which will cause the US to go the way of the Soviet Union later in the Century.  You’re seeing them in the “Tea Party” demonstrations on tax collection days and at the town hall meetings over the health care issues.  The Governor of Texas has actually suggested that his state can leave the Union if it wishes.

3)  The Biotech Revolution

We’ve continued on our quest for information on how life is organized.  I think that I have been way too optimistic about the speed of this revolution, since new facts have come to light.  (It turns out that the genome is not really a blueprint, but more like a snapshot of a running computer program.)  We may not have winged kittens soon, but we will probably have artificial life late this year–a full two and a half years earlier than I predicted.  I’ll modfify the earlier prediction by saying that the Moore’s Law intervals will be more like 24 or 30 months rather than 18.  This will probably mean that immortality will come too late for most Baby Boomers.  (That’s the Bad News.  The Good News is that younger generations won’t have to listen to Classic Rock for the next thousand years.)

4)  The Death of Print Newspapers

These have turned out to be quite a bit tougher than I initially imagined.  They’re dead, of course, but they don’t know it yet.  They’re trying a series of experiments to see what can save them and divesting themselves of any distractions–Zell selling the Cubs being the best example of that.  Murdoch’s trying to charge for content on the Internet, the Trib’s changed its style to look more like USA Today, and some newspapers have dropped print days.  In Champaign, the News-Gazette moved from an evening to a morning paper and rearranged its coverage.  I don’t expect any of these changes to work because one cannot overcome a six-orders-of-magnitude difference in production costs.

New Predictions

Now that I’ve got the class’s attention, it’s time to map out coming trends for the next few years.  As I said two years ago, if I end up 75% correct, I’ll be doing better than about anyone out there. 

1)  The Destruction of the Democratic Party

I expect that the mid-term elections of 2010 are going to make the losses in 1994 look trivial.  It’s quite possible that the Republicans will regain control of the House.  The debate over health-care will alienate the moderate blue-collar voters that gave Obama the Presidency. 

 Two PR time bombs are going to explode between now and November of 2010.  For the first time in memory, the net value of Social Security checks are going to drop–that’s the one which will happen very soon.  The cost-of-living adjustment will be zero for the next two years at the same time that the payee contribution to Medicare will go up.  This will cause the over-65 crowd, who vote constantly, to blame those currently in power for “taking away their Social Security to pay for some program or other they hate.”  The second one will occur over the first four months of next year.  Soon after the new Congress was seated, they passed a bill to lower the withholding taken out of paychecks.  They did this without lowering the actual tax liability.  This means that the average worker (who can’t afford a tax lawyer and is nowhere near paranoid enough) looked at his paycheck earlier this year and said, “Wow, they’re giving me more money now!”  Come January, when they finish calculating their taxes on form 1040EZ and see that the tax refund that would have put a down-payment on their big-screen TV is nonexistant and that they may actually owe money (that they won’t have), the pitchforks and torches are going to come out to play.  It is going to be seriously unpretty–I can hardly wait (especially since my family had their withholding changed pay back in what was reduced–heh, heh, heh).

In 2012, the GOP will regain the Senate.  Obama will, however, have won re-election by a first-quarter 2012 recovery bill that will look as if it’s working.  He will be the last Democratic President of the United States, since soon after his election, it will be clear that it really didn’t.

2)  The Double-Dip Depression

Even though the last six months has had the greatest stock market recovery since 1933, as I said above, like 1933, we’ve got another seven or eight years of Depression ahead of us.  Some of the high-percentage growth in the Dow and S&P have been in a few heavily-traded stocks, which have recovered due to government bail-outs.  Behind the curtain, though, none of the reasons for the initial stock drop have been remedied.  Remember, the burning economy of the 90s and the oughts were due to Baby Boomers spending money they didn’t have yet as fast as they could.  Their money is gone now–dissolved in homes that have lost half their value and 401ks that are now more like 201bs.  Their spending habits have changed, permanently, just like the habits of those who lived through Great Depression 1 changed.  In addition, close to a thousand banks are on the point of failing and had the FDIC not instituted two “special assessments” of member banks, it would already be out of money.

Around November of 2009, perhaps earlier if something traumatic happens (like a spike in oil prices, an assassination, or Israel attacking Iran), the market will crash again as those who trade stocks finally realize that there is absolutely nothing backing their paper.  This time there won’t be any real bottom–it’s possible that it might drop as low as 1400.  If the market continues even to exist after this trauma, it will recover to 2007 levels (adjusted for inflation) by around 2030.  This will, for all practical purposes, eliminate all but a few financial institutions and the rest of the retirement funds other than government pensions and Social Security.  The tax bases of the individual states will collapse to California levels and many supposedly essential services will be forced to close.

The official unemployment figures released by the Federal Government put unemployment at 9.4%.  In reality, if you count those workers who have stopped looking or have less hours than they want, you’re looking at 16%.  At the height of Great Depression 2, the official figures will run at 16% and the real value will be closer to 22 or 23%.  This will be the state of the economy by late 2012. 

The government will continue to attempt to remedy these economic woes by one action after another.  None will work, since the theories of economics that they’re using are still based upon a pre-information society in which nations were more independent.  Over the next five years or so, a new economic theory, rushed into being by the pressures of world economic collapse, will be devised and by applying it, recovery will slowly and carefully begin.

3) The Next Two Bubbles 

An economic bubble occurs when a good or service is priced far higher than would be paid if the market behaved rationally.  They’re nothing new, they’ve been happening as  long as there have been banks to loan money–the first big one was in Holland in the early 17th Century and involved tulips, of all things.

Right now, the two most overpriced goods available are education and health-care.  It’s a toss-up which one will be the first to go–my bet is education.

At the moment, universities across the country are turning out young people who are deeply in debt with no real way to pay it back.  The number of people currently employed within our economy is the same as it was in 2006.  This means that many jobs are only available by attrition–the retirement or firing of older employees.  The number of employees now able to retire has dropped drastically, which means that the number of new jobs are going to diminish, rather than increase.

In May of 2009, only about 20% of graduating college students in the US had jobs waiting for them when they left campus.  This means that, with the 50% drop-out rate (within the first four years) of college freshmen, a student paying his first-semester tuition has less than a ten percent job of getting a Bachelor’s Degree and a job three and a half years later.  Once the information that college will suck up any remaining mutual funds they have while providing little improvement in their child’s status, they’re going to start looking at alternatives or delay entry by a number of years until the “economy improves”  Of course, it’s not going to in the near term.  Dropping college enrollments will add to the loss of state revenues and alumni donations (as their funds dry up) and colleges will begin laying off non-essential personnel, which will reduce their effectiveness even further. 

I’m not sure what will replace brick-and-mortar institutions, probably something like the University of Phoenix, with its low overhead.  The University of Illinois had its chance to get in on the ground floor, but it blew that.

I’m going to save my analysis of the health-care bubble for a second article in a couple of days, since I want to talk about “Health-Care Reform” in detail anyway.

4)  Someone Elses Gets the Moon

Over the past eight years, the emphasis at NASA has been getting back to the Moon in preparation for a Mars mission later in the Century.  An advisor panel reported to the President and after consideration, the emphasis has been moved away from the Moon and placed elsewhere.  Each time this happens, it sets the program back four years (which is why post-depression private industry will end up being America’s drive into space.

Whatever flag is next planted on our satellite’s surface, the astronauts will be saying words like, “Uma etapa pequena…”  That’s fine, for NASA’s emphasis is now on the Lagrange Points and Earth-Crossing Asteroids, two destinations that will be ultimately much more useful, use less delta-V, and may end up saving the Earth’s life from an Armageddon-like scenario.

All right folks, I’ve just passed the 2000-word point, which is enough for a magazine article.  I welcome any comments, criticisms, discussion, as long as they’re civil.  Let’s talk.

Tom

It’s always a blast.  Over the past decade, we’ve had a Tasmanian, an Internet porn actress from Montreal, Washington lobbyists, a Russian Professor from Dalhousie, a regular on Dr. Demento, and a belly-dancing class.  The fun of the party is that you never quite know who you’re going to be sitting next to on the couch.

I’d love to see each and every one of you there.

Live like a Rockstar.  Love like it’s your last day on Earth.  Learn like your future depends on it.

Everything your suburban parents told you about the future was wrong.

Hate to break it to you, but you’re not going to have a better, easier life than your folks did because you went to college.  As a matter of fact, if you’ve got a bunch of student loans, you’re going to spend the next ten or fifteen years significantly worse off than they did.  The suburbs, the McMansions, the long commute–all of those are as dead as flappers and bathtub gin, wiped out in the orgy of corporate and government immorality and excess that was the ‘oughts.

Along with the lowered expectations, you’re going to have to deal with a constantly uncertain future which includes the loss of direct political impowerment–the latter due to the fact that you’re going to be spending so much time simply surviving that you won’t have time to change the world.  The speed of the internet will give you more than the disenfranchised Okies had, but not much.  Revolutionary change is the purview of the children of the upper-middle class and your parents just lost half the value of their houses and retirement accounts.

Baby-boomers don’t remember hard times, but we remember long hours at the feet of our parents and grandparents–they were still alive, so that proved that they could survive much harder times than you are going to face.  (There was no bank safety net in 1929–rather than losing “pretend values” in inflated houses and bloated 401ks, they put their paychecks in and watched the teller windows close for four or more years.)

For what it’s worth–and I don’t expect everyone to listen, any more than they did in March of 2007 when I first warned about the onrushing depression, here are some items culled from their advice and adapted for the realities of the 21st Century.

Plan on living on half your pre-crash salary.

Or, in the case of soon-to-be college graduates, your projected salary.  Odds are that you and/or your significant other will be out of work quite often as the economy re-adjusts and that the jobs that you’ll end up taking will pay quite a bit less than you planned.

How long will this be true?  It depends on which theory of economics applies.  The new President has a plan of action similar to the one that Roosevelt pursued during the 1930s.  Murray Rothbard claims that Roosevelt’s programs extended that Depression by six additional years.  Conventional historians counter that the Roosevelt plan reduced suffering and shortened the trough.  Others claim that nothing happened either way and that the reason that the Great Depression ended was the increase in innovative investment due to the US’s entry into the Second World War.

In short, no one knows, except that it’s not going to end anytime in the near future.  Vox Day, who has been spot on economically over the last decade, thinks that before it ends we’ll be seeing 17% unemployment in the United States.  This would not surprise me in the slightest and in order to keep eating and end up on the other side in a position allowing prosperity, every step from now on will have to be carefully considered.  It is entirely possible for a person to have a high-paying job one week and be out on the street the next.

Here’s some advice for getting yourself ready for harder times:

Sell as much of your extraneous crap as possible and pay off any loans you may currently have.

If Prescott’s right and we’re about to hit inflationary times, your interest rates, which are tied to the prime in many cases, will skyrocket and all you’ll be able to afford is close-to-minimum payments.  Remember, all you have to do is be late on one payment on some credit cards for them to jump ten or fifteen percent in rate–if you’re missing payments, you sure as hell can’t afford that to happen.

If I’m right and we’re going to have deflation, you want to hold on to as much cash as possible, since companies, desperate to keep any profit going at all, will be dropping the price on everything. This means that the dollars under your mattress will buy you $1.10 worth of stuff in a few months–it’s similar to what we’ve seen in electronics, but applied to the economy in general.  Those of us on fixed government pension incomes or with jobs that we hold on to will be sitting pretty in a deflationary situation.

So, debt is bad and cash on hand is good–besides, you didn’t really need that Boxster or the wall-length TV, did you?  Remember, the government made it much harder to declare bankruptcy than it used to be, so that option is less inviting than it was twenty years ago.

Rent, don’t buy.

As the number of unsold “investment houses” increases, owners, desperate to get anything out of them, will be dropping rents to what people can afford.  This is already starting to happen with business property in the downtown areas of large cities.  I expect this trend to continue and expand.  How low property values go will depend on inflationary/deflationary scenarios and how high unemployment goes.  Since that’s uncertain, you’ll lose every cent you put into a house that’s foreclosed and often that will be considerably more than you’d have had to pay for rent.

Team up to pool resources.

You don’t have to be married to use the kind of “efficiencies of scale” possessed by polygamous families.  It is cheaper to live as a couple than it is alone and costs per person can be reduced by up to 75% per person by living as a group of five rather than as a couple.  In addition, large family or peer groups increase the liklihood of one of the members having employment income as times get harder.  The number of practical skills in the experiential pool are likely to be much higher in a large group than in a couple.  During the 1930s, all this went without saying, since the nuclear family didn’t exist until after World War 2.  Large extended groups, related or not, will mark a return to the natural state of human living.

Despite low costs and the lure of bargains, do not invest in stocks.

From a strictly historical standpoint, the slowest recovery in a suddently-altered economy are stocks.  If you look at the Great Depression, the values of the major index did not reach 1929 levels (adjusted for inflation) until 1954.  You do not want to wait that long.  Those who had liquidity during the GD bought tangible items being auctioned off to pay back taxes–some of them are still in the family three generations later.  While it is not necessarily true that the same conditions apply during this time period, I believe that the kind of government interference in the marketplace that’s coming up will impede, rather than encourage, stocks’ return to pre-crash rates.

Keep enough money on hand to relocate.

Recovery, like the rest of the future is not going to be evenly distributed.  In the past, those who were willing to go where the jobs were had an advantage.  While this will be lessened by 21st Century communications, skills in tangible industries cannot be transmitted over the airwaves.  Get some “get out of the country” money together and don’t touch it, no matter what.

Whatever you do, keep your internet access and phone service.

The greatest advantage we have over the folks in 1929 is the speed and volume of our communications technology.  Even though it seems to be a luxury, the ‘Net will be invaluable to set yourself up for the next section of advice….

Diversify Your Skill Set

“Anything for a Buck America”–You’re Punk’d

A large number of seemingly-indestructable American institutions are going to become a thing of the past in the next ten years.  People who are currently involved with the Big Three Automakers, unions like the UAW and Machinists’ Union, print newspapers and magazines, non-bank financial institutions, and large law and lobbying firms will find themselves in the same position as the makers of buggy whips after the introduction of the automobile.  The economic and moral paradigms that allowed these institutions to prosper will have changed permanently by the time the dust settles.

The false economic paradigms involved the belief that the rate of innovation allowed the perpetuation of inherent inefficiencies in concept.  In other words, business was so good that CEOs could have salaries 300 times that of a line worker, the union workers could work thirty years and retire with full salaries, and newspapers could charge for advertising even though no one was reading them anymore.

The false moral paradigms involved the belief that if an end was good enough, any means was allowable.  Over time, in a post-religious society, this evolved into one where the improvement of one’s own position was a desirable end that would allow illicit means if no one was watching or if the means were clever enough.  This has culminated financially in pyramid schemes like Madoff’s and politically in the kind of corruption Blo-jo has demonstrated in Illinois and that permeates even the new administration, with its ties to Tony R and the Clinton Foundation’s foreign “donations.”  When financial times get hard, the moralities taught by the major religions become more attractive across society.  This will institute a backlash that will ripple through the halls of both Wall Street and K Street.  While I don’t expect that investment, lobbying, and law firms will be outlawed, per se, I expect that they will be regulated to such a great extent that they’ll have to lay off half of their junior partners just to pay their own legal fees to satisfy the Federal regulators.

What should I do with my new degree in Finance?

Damn, sorry to hear about that, dude.  Tough break.

Best thing to do would be to start working on some salable skills that could aid in keeping you alive.  Right now, an internship in organic chicken farming is a lot better deal than one at Citibank.  The arts and entertainment are often good ways to bring in nightly money.  Bars and dance clubs have good evenings as people try to forget their troubles, you might consider calling your classmates and getting a garage band going if you have any talent.  (Billy Joe–you may get your chance to be a poet and street musician, after all.)

Odds are, you’ll be out of work enough that both gardening and craft skills will help to save enough money to keep a roof over your head.  There are hundreds of sites on the Internet that teach you how to sew your own clothes, raise your own zuccini, cook your own meatless dishes and fix your own electronic devices.  Any of the above can also be used as barter to get you stuff you cannot make yourself–a move towards a more cashless economy.

“Ha!  My degree is in Electrical Engineering–I’ve got a job for sure!”

Well, ‘fraid not.  You see, the second thing that happens after a company lays off the 20% of dead weight in their low-level work force is that they start cutting R&D.  If you look at the late 1970s, the American carmakers had so little research going on that they nearly lost the auto market permanently to the innovative Japanese.  The word in corporate America is “last hired, first laid-off” so you either won’t get a job, or you’ll have it until the next ledge on the way down to the bottom is reached and you’ll get axed, then.

There is a bright spot for you, though.  With the lack of competition from the major corporations, garage tech has a higher liklihood of coming up with something that someone will want to purchase in the periods when there’s a bit of money floating around.  Apple and Microsoft both came out of the late-70s recession and I doubt very much that they could have done so if IBM and Texas Instruments had had their engineering staffs fully operational.  I know that this sounds like the equivalent of saying “get your classmates and start a band” but the paradigm has worked in the past and now, with the speed of communications, you don’t even have to be in the same town to work together.

“How about the intangible professions, I hear education and health care are increasing the number of jobs?”

They are, for now.  The problem with education, though, is that jobs there are dependent on a reasonably affulent tax base, which has just gone with the wind.  There’s a feedback delay of about two years, I figure, between the loss of business and personal revenue and its reflection in the education industry.  No big loss, I figure, modern educational institutions are useless at best and a menace to society at worst.  The University of Illinois will be laying educators off by 2010, I figure.

Health care is a more chaotic case–after all, when you have a heart attack, you don’t look at investment opportunities.  There will always be some jobs in health care, but the insurance companies that are currently financing the expansion of hospitals and clinics have been hit as hard by the financial downturn as the rest of the economy–one of the big three, as a matter of fact, is close to bankruptcy.  If the government gets involved, there will be extensive regulation of one kind or another that will freeze innovation and limit the number of jobs available in the industry.  In addition, a government-run health industry will make it dependent on collected revenue.  If there is a universal health plan promulgated by the Obama administration, I figure the industry lay-offs will start about 2011.

Plan for the Other Side of the Depression

Sooner or later, the depression is going to be over and the world will go back to a semblance of normalcy.  That world won’t look very much like ours, however.  The suburbs will be ghost towns, workers will get paid more in cash and less in benefits, and health care will either be self-paid (in the more libertarian future) or totally governmental (in the police-state future).

Business will be cut-down, streamlined, and transparent to a degree that no one can imagine right now.  I expect that the day-to-day dealings of all industries to be examinable by the government and the citizenry–sort of a “freedom of information act” for commerce.  Families are going to be larger (and not necessarily all hetero or monogamous).  They’re also going to be church-going–I expect that this long financial downturn will finally put the kibosh on the “brights” movement and most of the secular humanists.

So, you want to be rich in twenty years?  Figure out new industries that depend on lightning-fast reactions to the needs of large extended families and that operates in a totally moral manner.  That ought to do fine.

That said, my stories, for me, come in two categories–ones that are easy to write and ones that are like pulling teeth.  There doesn’t seem to be any relationship between the difficulty and how good they end up being–my gay werewolf story was painfully difficult, yet it is one of the best things I’ve ever written.  On the other hand, there’s a short-short fairy tale that I wrote in two hours that ended up leaving audiences saying, “what the hell is he talking about?”  I still haven’t found a way to end that one successfully.

The easy stories, of which Mitzi’s Christmas Morning is one, involve a special relationship between the vision center of my brain and my fingers.  What I am doing, essentially, is watching the scene unfold with my eyes “inside of my brain” and then describing what happens to my audience.  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the words that I’m writing–I’ll fix any problems there during later rewrites and revisions.  Instinctive understanding and use of Point of View, is therefore critical to the story working.

I write for a number of reasons–to impress people, to attract or induce lust in members of the opposite sex, to give stories as presents, to make money, or just because there’s an idea inside my head that’s so cool that it has to come out.  I wrote this particular story because I wanted to start a tradition of writing a Christmas story each year to share with my friends and fans.

There are different ways to narrate a story–you can have the protagonist describe the action, that’s first-person.  You can describe what happens to a character in the third-person, but limit your descriptions to what the character would know–that’s third-person subjective.  If you limit that to only one character for the whole story, it’s called third-person limited.  There’s also third-person omniscient, which allows you to tell information that your character at the time couldn’t possibly know.

One of my favorite short-stories of all time is one written by Fritz Leiber in 1958 called Space-Time For Springers. It’s told from the point of view of a kitten with an IQ of 160.  Gummitch, the kitten, bounces around the house watching over the new baby, doing astrophysics in his spare time and trying to drink coffee so he can become human.  It’s a wonderful story–hopefully, those of you who are SF fans can find it in a collection somewhere.  It’s well worth the search.

So, clever idea of story from cat’s point of view and a need for a Christmas story–what’s not to like?  In Leiber’s story, the kitten had pet names for the humans.  (If I remember correctly, the woman of the house was called “Kitty Come Here”.)  I decided to copy that motif throughout the story, not only for the humans, but for the other animals around our house, too.

The plot was simple–kitty-cat discovers catnip under the Christmas tree and destroys it in an amusing fashion.  Ideal for a short-short–action, conflict, resolution in one narrative scene.  The job, then, was to try to get inside Mitzi’s head for an hour or two.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in non-human’s heads over the past couple years–disembodied souls installed in diamonds, rhyming fairies, gay werewolves–and I think the best way to do this is to find ways of thinking that are as good as human, but different.  (Not an original thought–John Campbell urged his Astounding authors to use this method to create aliens.)

With all the preliminary thinking done, it’s time to write.  I didn’t bother with an outline, but instead visualized waking up in Mitzi’s body and followed her through her Christmas morning rounds.  I have spent a lot of time with cats over the last fifty-plus years.  I know that they hate change, they’re attracted to things that move, some are territorial, and they have attention spans that would put the worst ADD sufferer to shame.  I tried to logically include as many of those characteristics in the story as I could as part of the narrative.  (I got used to seeing through animal eyes while working on the werewolf story–both of the guys in that were completely color-blind.)  As the story progressed, I focused on how the things in an ordinary household would appear to someone at floor level, but with a strong three-dimensional pouncing ability.

Since this was a Christmas card from the family, I included all of the cats that would be upstairs, as well as mentioning all of the people in the household.  It was a lot of fun thinking of characteristics and names for everyone.

The hardest part of the story, really, was the point-of-view switch at the end (and I’m not completely satisified with how that turned out, to be completely honest with you).  I went through two or three iterations of the last two paragraphs.  I had a problem, you see:  Since Mitzi was passed out, she couldn’t describe the final scene effectively, so I had to import a new character to observe–that’s one of the problems with third-person limited.  I could have switched to a completely human perspective for this, but decided instead allow the narrator to still be in “cat-mode” to avoid a jarring wrench out of the rest of the story.

Josh, I hope this answers your question sufficiently.  If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please ask.

The furnace kicked on and the warm air blew over her—striking her at the line where her tabby fur and orange stripes blended into the brown and gold of her tortoiseshell markings. Mitzi yawned and opened one eye to check the dining room. If she was going to wake up, it would be for a reason worthy of her attention.

Not a creature was stirring. The streetlights shone on the wall and when she opened her other eye, her pupils widened from slits to ovals. Rising to her feet, she stretched to her full length and stopped to wash a patch of itchy fur. Time to do rounds, she thought, something might not accept her ownership.

She padded into the kitchen, found a morsel of dropped food under the edge of the kitchen island and tossed it into her mouth. Mmmm. Chicken skin. There was dry food and water near the sliding stairway door to where Soft Bed slept every night. Mitzi ate enough to satisfy her tummy and walked into the hallway.

The usual line of upstairs cats slept on the floor—it was always warm there for some reason. She was no scientist, but she was aware of her world and took advantage of its natural phenomena every chance she could. Old Girl and Meat Loaf lay on one side of the hall and Stripe-Tom on the other. From behind the door of the bedroom, Shoulder-Girl and Poppa snored, the latter shaking the door when he inhaled. All was as it should be for an early morning.

The living room was different than usual and had been for days now. She, like most of her kind, hated change with a passion—all her walking and jumping routes were altered and anything out of her control bothered her. The new tall object, many cat-lengths high, was covered with shiny things. More change—ewwww—now there were boxes under the tall thing. They weren’t there when she fell asleep. Should she be afraid? Should she run forward and attack? None of the boxes moved.

She launched herself onto the couch, hit a cushion and rebounded onto the arm of the chair. From there, it was simple to walk across the side of the wall, moving from window-sill to window-sill. She paused alongside the tall thing to bat at a round ball with a cat inside of it that moved when she did. The inside cat hit back at her each time she made a move. She hit the ball hard and it came loose and bounced against the wall, dropping into the pile of boxes below her. That’d show the stupid tiny cat!

When she got to the end of the windows, she leapt to the speakers, to the box with pictures (black at the moment), and then to the floor, arriving right next to an unsuspecting box. She put her paw forward, poking it against a ribbon. The box did nothing. Was it asleep or dead? Dead things were sometimes edible like the food in the kitchen, nice to sleep on like the furniture, or fun to play with. The box was none of those, so she dismissed it. It was time to go back to her warm spot and sleep.

There was a smell here, though—one that taunted her when she tried to ignore it. She drew in a deep breath. By Tuna, it smelled better than anything she’d ever smelled before. Where was it coming from?

Mitzi stepped up, climbing even higher onto the pile of boxes. There was a gap between them and she slipped her head into it. Aha! At the bottom of the pile was a box with the yummy smell all over it. She pushed the top box over and it slid down the pile. The white tip of her tail lashed as she pulled at others with her front paws.

She didn’t see the black streak as Demon Black Fluff, her feline nemesis, flew from her hiding place near the wall. Fluff landed on her, biting at Mitzi’s fur and pulling at it with her teeth. Mitzi let out a howl of anger, pulled away from her attacker, and somersaulted into a clear area. Both of the cats arched their backs, sang their warning songs, and snarled. It was a standoff. The Demon was willing to maim with her teeth, but lacked the front claws that made Mitzi so proud. Mitzi didn’t fight with other cats except to play, so she lacked the aggression of her opponent. They sang louder, filling the living room with noise.

BANG. The bedroom door opened and then slammed shut. Poppa’s footsteps came down the hallway and into the living room. He made some not-cat noises and picked the Demon up in his arms, carrying her away into the kitchen. Mitzi heard the sliding door and knew she didn’t have to worry for a while. Having a peaceful reputation was useful, if nothing else.

Once Poppa had returned to bed, she resumed her project—the buried box. It smelled wonderful for a dead thing. She pushed boxes off of it until its entire top was visible. It wasn’t square like the other ones and it was soft and rolled into a cylinder. There was a ribbon around the center with a piece of paper attached. She chewed the paper in two bites, spitting it out when she realized it had no taste.

Mitzi looked around carefully. Sometimes she was punished for using her claws on dead things. No one was visible in the living room—not even White Old Lady, who often slept by the corner register to ease her arthritis. Safe. She tore the paper wrapping on the box into tiny bits within seconds. They flew around her, landing a full cat-length away in some cases. Inside was not a box at all, but a clear bag with something inside—something that smelled like heaven.

The plastic didn’t last any longer than the paper had. Her claws shredded the bag and the plant bits inside fell out. They smelled even stronger than before. Her eyes watered, her whiskers twitched, and her tail stuck out so straight she almost pulled a muscle. Joy! The room swirled—even things that were dull a moment before were mesmerizing. This is what the other cats must mean by “catnip”, she thought. She couldn’t imagine anything else that would do this to her.

The silver tinsel on the tree called to her, teasing. There were many more balls hanging on the tree than she had seen before and each one of them had an inside cat that looked just like her. She would have reacted to their challenge, but her back legs weren’t working right and she fell over on her side in the shredded paper. For some reason, this was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. Moving quickly just resulted in her writhing on the wrapping paper.

When she got onto her feet again, the ribbons on the other packages were moving. Snakes! She crouched and waved her tail in the air, ready to kill. These ribbon-snakes, like all snakes, were a natural enemy. Her pounce took her over the pile of boxes onto a larger one with a deadly-looking ribbon. Her teeth were like blades, ripping the ribbon into bite-sized pieces that she swallowed. Ugh! Nasty thing.

Now, the wall of boxes moved, taunting her. She leapt onto it, striking out with her front claws against the top one and then falling down into the center. She grabbed a small box with her front paws and raked it with her back claws. Again and again she struck, first against the boxes—then moving fast against the tinsel and ball-cats. When she finished, exhausted, she had killed everything infesting the tall thing. The bodies of the offenders were at her feet. She lay, nose in the heavenly-smelling plant bits, and fell into a near-coma.

Tall-Chair came through the back door of the house and was most of the way through the dining room before he saw the carnage beneath the Christmas tree. Presents were unwrapped, boxes had their tops torn off, and ornaments lay in pieces around the base. Lying beneath the tree, holding the bag of organically-grown farm catnip up to her face, was Mitzi, unconscious, with a long strand of tinsel wrapped around her back legs.

He was laughing while he walked through the kitchen on his way to the back steps, dodging other cats along the way—they’d need everyone to get this cleaned up before company came over. “Hey,” he called out the back door to Table-Feeder—who was busy walking Barker—“next time we’ll have to double-bag the kitties’ present.”

May you have as much fun as my cats on Christmas morning and a prosperous New Year full of catnip (or its equivalent).

My father, my brother, and my son all served in the United States Army.  While I often disagree with the internal affairs of our nation, I understand that a government and its military are essential to the continued survival of any people.  Those who believe that violence never solved anything should, as Robert Heinlein said in Starship Troopers, “ask a Carthaginian.”  Violence has solved too many things over the history of humanity, in most cases in ways unpleasant for the less-prepared.

There is no person greater than one who is willing to place their body, mind, and life in front of those who would harm another.  We must never forget that–nations who do, do not last very long afterwards.

To the living veterans of our nation, thank you.  To those who have given their lives and cannot read this, you are in my prayers, always.

I miss you, Mike, every day.

It is time to face facts. In spite of the largest turn-out by liberals, the largest turn-out by young people, and the largest turn-out by gays in the history of the state of California, this measure was still passed. What does this mean?

In my opinion, it means that the cause is lost. The California and Arizona defeats for state-sponsored gay marriage combined with the married-only adoption measure in Arkansas point out that no matter how much supporters want such, the majority of people in the US, even including some of the non-racist, liberal elite that elected the first black President, just aren’t comfortable with the state sponsoring marriage between men or between women. In other words, folks, if it didn’t happen this year, it’s not going to–it’s a high-water mark for the issue like 1979 was for the ERA.

It has been my opinion for decades that giving the government control over who gets married has been a disaster. Whether it be the miscegenation laws of the 1950s, the back-and-forth, now you’re married, now you’re not of California and Massachusetts, or the persecution of polygamists by the state of Texas, the government has proven that it cannot be trusted with the inalienable right of individuals to form unions as they please.

Why would anyone want the government’s nose in their business, anyway–advocates of opening the definition of marriage certainly want the government out of their bedrooms, don’t they? As always, it falls into the fallacy of money being more efffectively distributed by the government than by individual action. Those who advocate gay marriage want the so-called benefits offered to heterosexual married couples, even though many of those benefits have been offered in an attempt to control their behavior and move them toward the actions the government sees as desirable.

Urbanagora has a great crop of thinkers–folks in the economic, futurist, political, and activist realms. I’ve got a challenge for all of you to work on with me…..

Since we cannot gain what we want from the government, nor, (seeing that young people with a given opinion keep that opinion throughout their lives) can we expect to do so in the next twenty-five years, let us design a way of making the benefits for couples and multiples better than those offered by the government for heterosexual couples. We can discuss economic strategies, contracts, ways to put pressure on employers, union-like actions. I’m open to any idea that does not start out…”we get this measure passed by Congress” or “if the courts rule such-and-such.” Government has failed–it’s up to each of us to take up the slack.

Those of us who read Chicago’s two newspapers and listened to its radio stations over the last thirty years were lucky enough to be taught by three great men–who are not only Pultizer Prize winning authors, but great moral philosophers, epitomizing the heart, the soul, and the mind of Chicago. Outside the Midwest, they were given grudging acknowledgment–seen as exceptions to the rule rather than defining it. We knew, however, that we had something very special here.

Mike Royko was the soul of the city–the two-fisted, hard-drinking son of Eastern European immigrants who migrated from newspaper to newspaper as their politics changed. He took on the all-powerful Daley machine with a book that was physically torn from its shelves by the Mayor’s wife. He was never afraid of anyone and regularly published extremely critical letters that he received, shredding their writers like a cat sharpening its claws on a cardboard box. He was a friend to the working man, whom he represented in his columns as the Polish-American Slats Grobnik. Hanging out at the Billy Goat Tavern, he made it famous enough to be featured in Second City comedy troupe skits and, in return, the bar sponsored the Sun-Times softball team.

Roger Ebert is the mind of Chicago even though he was born further south, in our own Champaign-Urbana, where he returns yearly to host his Overlooked Film Festival. He worked in Hollywood without being absorbed by it–coming back to review movies and comment on life in general. Over the years, he expanded in his realm of commentary, showing us that the movies were the dark glass through which we observed our day-to-day lives. Even illness was not sufficient to silence his ink, although it succeeded in stopping his razor-tongue. With only prose remaining, his art has become breathtaking in its depth, showing his verve for living and knowledge that every day of the rest of his life is gravy.

Studs Terkel was Chicago’s heart for over sixty years. He was a pioneer of television broadcasting (until he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era) and a radio personality, but he was best known to the rest of the world as an author and historian. It is in this capacity that he will be remembered, I believe, since he changed the way in which the world saw historical writing.

While he may not have invented oral history as a method of recording events, he perfected it as a literary form. Starting in 1967, he covered topics others had already, but his winning smile and ready ear coaxed those who had not opened up before to speak. He worked on hard subjects, too, ones that Americans often would rather not think about–race and death and class, for starters. Using an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, he would travel to the homes of rock stars, politicians, steel workers, and maids…he always seemed to love best those who would invisibly clean up our messes. From his interviews, we learned that the past was much more than we had imagined, that it was not a reflection of our times, but a time of its own with its own special rules, joy, and sorrow.

He wasn’t a Communist, despite the accusations during the 1950s. What he was, was a human being who believed in the best that humanity could offer and who searched through the hearts of those he met until he uncovered that spark of goodness in each of us. He remained active as an agitator very late in life, even filing suit against ATT in 2006 about its cooperation with the Bush Administration in turning over documents to Homeland Security.

He won’t have a tombstone to visit. His ashes will be mixed with those of his beloved wife, Ida, and scattered over the ground in Bughouse Square–the spot near where he grew up that was host to radical speakers during the 20s and 30s who stood on soapboxes and preached against the ills of fascism, exploitation, and hatred. The wind from the lake will scatter these ashes, blowing them in ever-widening circles until every corner of the city will have a little bit of Studs to call its own. There has been no one like him before and there will never be anyone like him again. Rest in peace.

I hope you enjoy reading my interview, as well as the other thirty he has posted.  I feel honored to be in the company of award-winners like John Scalzi.  Hell, he even asked me some of the same questions!

Tom