Dawn of the Unthinkable (11 page)


Determine the value of
everything that is produced in society and whether valuable
resources should continue to be used to produce that item. Every
responsible member of society shall vote on the value of each item
by using a computer in each home. For instance, fine restaurants
will be rated on a scale from 1 to 10, with those rated 10 more
accessible to high achievers, or those who save their lower-rated
restaurant credits to go there occasionally. When society has
determined the value of all goods and services (a continual
process), individuals will be able to choose amongst them based on
their lifestyle level with small consumable items continually
replenished and larger items ordered and their supply
tracked.


A person’s contribution
to society shall not be over or under valued, be he a neurosurgeon
or a disabled person. Those with high lifetime achievements will be
rewarded by society with a lifestyle that reflects those
achievements, but it will no longer be so ostentatious as to arouse
envy or resentment amongst others. Those who have difficulty
achieving will still receive the minimum guaranteed level of
sustenance to maintain their dignity and self-respect.


The majority of the
divestment of assets will occur naturally with the abolishment of
money. The rest of the divestment will take place over an extended
period of time, with small portions of land or other physical
holdings being returned to society by several successive
generations of the family holding the assets. As this entire plan
is not made for actualization in its entirety until July 4, 2076,
those who currently own the assets will not have to divest in their
lifetime, but they will not be able to pass on vast land holdings,
as is the current practice. Society is in too great a need of
certain pieces of property to continue to have them be held by just
one member of society. The courts can assist in this matter, as it
promises to be the most contentious.


A person will be given a
menu to select from that reflects their status when first entering
the new society. The menu will allow each person to tailor his
individual preferences. For instance, someone who prefers nice cars
to fine foods can choose to have more and better selections in that
category. Those who prefer both will have to make certain choices
so that society can make adequate plans as to how to distribute its
resources. The menu selections can be changed on a semi-annual
basis to be made more reflective of a person’s desires. The menu
will have a “needs” and “wants” section to ensure that all get what
they need before the wants of society are fulfilled.


Everyone who is making
contributions and achievements, no matter how small, will be given
at least one week of vacation a year at a resort commensurate with
their standing. As there are currently always some vacancies in
some resorts, the families will be matched with available
locations, and they will be able to take themselves and/or their
family there. The value of the location will be determined by
society, and a family may request a certain location, which will be
approved, if possible, by evaluators. If not approvable, for
whatever reason, alternate dates and locations will be offered. It
is important that increased opportunities for entertainment and
relaxation be offered, in order to reduce the stress that leads to
problems in our current society.

He stopped with the valuation section at
that point. The topics would probably need more explaining, but if
he was going to make this thing article length, he had to cut it
off at certain points. Already, he could envision a savage editor
going through it with a machete, carving it to pieces. Well, he
could live with that if it would get it published. If this article
ever saw the light of day, it would be his crowning jewel in
lifetime achievements.

Who am I kidding
, he thought.
It
would probably get rejected out of hand.
He had no experience
submitting stuff to magazines, but he figured they must get
thousands of pieces each month and probably just threw them out if
they didn’t recognize the name. Would they be foolish enough to
throw out one that might be the solution to all life’s problems?
The thought that
he
could come up with a workable plan
amused him, and he shook his head and said, “Why not?”.

Wayne Cunningham looked into the sea of
uninterested faces and hoped to see a spark. He realized that
Politics and Policy 101 was a requirement for many of these
students, and for that reason was just a class that they just
wanted to get over and forget about.

As a professor it was hard to make things
that were life and death to him appear exciting to business or
anthropology students that didn’t experience the same reality. As a
black man the things that he was teaching had allowed him to rise
to the position he was in—a full professor at a large urban
university. The majority of these kids were interested in one
future thing: making money. Because they did not see his class as a
vehicle for them to learn any secrets toward reaching that goal,
they considered it a complete waste of time and gave it as little
attention as they could get away with. He sighed and thought.
If
they only realized that the underpinnings of practically everything
of importance that went on could be traced back to somebody’s
politics, they might actually be effective right from
graduation
. As it was, most of these children would spin their
wheels for about ten years before they figured out how to be a
player. By that time, they would have been handed their head or
backstabbed about a dozen times by more experienced, political
practitioners. He wondered if maybe then,
something
he had
taught them might come back to them and be of use.

That was why he had gotten into teaching in
the first place. As an early learner, he had stuck out from the
rest of his inner-city crowd in elementary school and throughout
the rest of his school years. He finished books and assignments
well before the rest of his class and was eventually skipped ahead
two grades. In college he took a double major, political science
and sociology, feeling that politics ran the institutions he cared
about but people made the politics, and he wanted to know both. He
had raced through his master’s and doctoral degrees as there was
always someone looking to give an academically gifted black man
scholarship money. He wasn’t particularly proud that the system
reacted with surprise when someone from his background made it to
the top academically; he just took advantage of it. And when the
community leaders came looking for him to step forward for elective
office, he declined, telling them that someone like himself could
have more impact teaching others, helping develop their minds, and
multiplying the effect of his having “made it.”

But here he sat in front of a class of bored
freshmen who wanted no parts of him or his dusty theories. At least
that’s what they thought of his analysis of the Cold War breakdown
and the effect of European Unification. He had sat in on some of
the classes of more senior professors and watched with excitement
as their students engaged them in intellectual battles over more
mundane treaties and little known bureaucrats. This was where he
wanted to be; these were the minds that he wanted to influence. The
only problem was that tenured senior professors tended to never
retire, only having to teach maybe two courses a semester and
having graduate students grade the tests. It was a cushy job, and
he would be long in the tooth before he got a crack at those
fertile minds. He was starting to consider going back to the
community leaders and seeing what might be available to run for,
but he knew full well from what he had studied how much of his soul
he would have to sell to do that. Poor fools had to spend more time
raising money than actually helping anyone.
That has
to
suck,
he thought.

Besides, he wasn’t sure he had enough
ambition anymore. In his mid-thirties, he was now settled into the
academic life, which was awfully hard to leave. The respect he
received from his community was very gratifying because they
realized while anyone could be a politician, very few black men
became professors. Hell, it was amazing enough when one made it to
adulthood without being arrested as Cunningham had. Oh, he had come
close on several occasions, mouthing off to cops or being on the
fringe of a protest where a couple of dozen people were locked up,
but he had never gotten snagged himself. He had made a vow with
himself early on that he wouldn’t become part of the depressing
statistics for his race, which showed that high percentages of the
males were under supervision by the criminal justice system. He had
stuck to his books and now was a member of academia. While he was
satisfied with that, he was starting to feel the rumblings of
discontent that arise when one isn’t challenged enough.

He felt that he had the makings of a fine
leader. Although academic life rarely called for soaring rhetoric,
he felt he had studied enough real leaders to imitate their means
and methods if the situation called for it. He knew it was a long
way from actually doing something to having read about it, but he
knew he had it in him. He had been in the service as an ROTC
Lieutenant and had been honorably discharged after serving his
hitch. He had been on the school board also, but that did not lead
to the type of major overhauls that he wanted to be a part of. He
felt that he had analyzed enough history to know what
not
to
do, and half the time, that is what good leaders knew best. But if
he wasn’t willing to play the political game, he had no future, as
people didn’t just march up to your door and draft you. So here he
sat in the ivory tower, knowing what he would try if he could but
was apparently never going to get the chance.

Of course, the matter of race still stood in
the way. Very few black men had made it to the top, and the ones
who did, like Colin Powell—who apparently was much like him and
didn’t want to sell his soul to the moneychangers—were few and far
between. He still wished Powell would go for the Presidency just to
make it easier for the next blacks to run. He had been in the
unique position to run a “successful” war, which didn’t come around
too often. History often showed that the leaders of a successful
war were often handed civilian leadership positions (Eisenhower,
Grant, Washington) when they retired, so Powell might have been a
shoo-in if he chose to run. But as he himself had made almost an
identical decision, he couldn’t fault Powell.

His students did appreciate his insight into
how the common people were affected by the decisions from on high.
He had done much of his research on how people down below had lived
and often died as a result of the political upheaval generated by
just a few people. While it was often hard to get interested in
treaties, agreements, and other long-winded documents, when he
explained how craftsmen ended up making showerheads to pipe gas
into German extermination chambers, the students paid attention.
Unfortunately, after he told them a story that grabbed them, he
still had to get back to the meat and potatoes, and the lights
would go back out in their eyes. He knew that the students he
taught usually wouldn’t go on to be poli-sci majors, but he also
knew that if they only paid attention, they might be able to avoid
many mistakes in their lives that had already been made by someone
else.
Oh well, you could only lead a horse to water
, he
thought.

He had recently become interested in an
obscure line of politics called utopian socialism. Sir Thomas More
had written a story in the 1500s about an island where the people
had developed an enviable lifestyle based on mutual cooperation
rather than capitalism. The word “utopia” had entered the language
to describe an extremely desirable state of living, but given human
nature, it was likely unattainable. The further progression to a
whole way of thought based on the original concept was utopian
socialism, which was defined in
Webster’s
as, “a belief that
social ownership of the means of production can be achieved by
voluntary and peaceful surrender of their holdings by propertied
groups.” He wondered if it could be the answer to the problems that
bothered him so much. He felt it needed a lot more development,
though, because other than some donations, he didn’t see “the
propertied groups” voluntarily surrendering their holdings. If
fact, the really rich donated less of their wealth as a percentage
than people with less income. So utopia could pretty much be
described as a fool’s paradise, and he knew that if you espoused it
too fervently, people would think you were deranged. Or, as in the
case of poor Sir Thomas, you could lose your head.

He had even tried it out on some of his
students. Most had just laughed at him, like, “Yeah right, as if we
could survive without money,” or, “We’ve already experienced
utopia. You put it in a paper wrapper and smoke it.” It was amazing
how quickly young minds become jaded with the inevitability of
having to chase dollars their whole lives. By the time they reached
his door, they were completely convinced that their happiness
depended on getting a job with a high salary, and if they could get
it by cheating or lying, why, that was okay, too. At times he felt
a little ashamed that he was one of those training these future
corporate raiders, but then he would think that maybe a future
Gandhi or Martin Luther King was sitting out there, too. He
wondered if he would recognize such a person if they came along and
whether he would have an influence on their thinking. He liked to
think that he would.