December 14, 2016

Horse 2204 - Oddvent: Dec 14 - The Ghost Of Christmas Future

‘twas the eleventh night before Christmas.

December 14th is the twelfth day of the made-up characters calendar and being St Doctor's Day, the day that The Doctor gave himself the idea of going into the past to steal a TARDIS, we shall now tell another story of something which came from the future.

Owing to the miracle that is time travel, I received an email from myself which was dated 13th December 2017; in it I remembered the absolute dumpster fire that was The International Year Of The Howling Moron, 2016, with fondness from a year which I can only assume will be far worse, judging from the photographs attached.

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Dear Horse of Christmas Past,
I write to you from a very different and bleak world. Britain has gone full on hard Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg has become British Foreign Minister and keeps on popping up on telly as does Boris Johnson who is now Chancellor Of The Exchequer, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is banging on about plans for the republic after the death of Queen Elizabeth II and President Of The United States Donald Trump has managed to simultaneously create and avert no less than twelve nuclear crises in the eleven months of his administration thus far.

Obamacare was repealed and this had the effect of throwing 33 million people out of the health care system. When the Columbian Flu outbreak of October happened, hospitals started turning people away at an astonishing rate and many people ended up dying of diseases which should have been otherwise treatable. Diseases not seen in more than a century such as tuberculosis, cholera and even scurvy, started to reappear in emergency rooms and doctors often didn't know how to treat these presenting patients.

It didn't really help that the rhetoric coming out of the White House was as pointed as it had been during the election campaign. Immigrants were blamed for all sorts of ills including unemployment, epidemics and rising inflation but the biggest elephant in the room was the one with the haircut that looks like a squirrel has taken up residence and the unfettered and uncontrolled Republican Party who were given the keys to all three branches of government and promptly drove the democracy bus into a building.
The minimum wage in the United States was removed entirely and instead of trying for fifteen or twelve dollars an hour, American workers will have to be content with seven.

China has repeatedly flown it's nuclear capable bombers over the South China Sea in a display of military might, ISIS continues to pour out its own kind of suffering and nonsense on the people of Iraq and Syria which is a distraction from the fact that Assad is still a horrible leader, we've had the removal of the South Korean president, the installation of Marie La Pen as President of France and it was concluded that Russian hackers did not have any effect on the US Presidential Election whatsoever. This has only helped to make Vladimir Putin look like a sane person and he has just recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the person of the year and as joined the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Trump. Make of that what you will.

In our own country, Scott Morrison was able to get the budget passed with the help of the wing nuts in the Senate, Peter Dutton was able to convince the Philippines to take on several thousand refugees and in a wave of extreme cussedness, when the entire nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu both disappeared beneath the surface of the ocean due to rising sea levels, we had statements from Pauline Hanson, Cory Bernardi and David Leyonhjelm, all saying that climate change isn't real. At any rate, as climate change isn't apparently real, those people couldn't very well be refugees and so we didn't accept any of them because they had nothing to seek asylum from.

The last Holden Commodore rolled off the production line in October, the last Australian built Toyota Camry rolled off the production line in July, the last Australian built washing machine left the factory in Orange in June but we shouldn't be worried because even though we lost almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs this year, the economy still continued to grow because rents increased 8% across the board. Praise be the economy.

Still, you're looking at the end of 2016 thinking that things couldn't possibly get worse. Let me tell you from the future that things did. The International Year Of The Howling Moron was followed by The International Year Of The Screaming Powerful those who had power exercised it in increasingly belligerent ways. You will look back on those heady days of the dumpster fire with fondness as we in the future are preparing to metaphorically throw our children into woodchippers.

Season's greetings,
The Horse of Christmas Future.
Best Wishes - you'll need them.

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