Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

“Maybe we have become our enemy. Maybe we studied them so hard, eventually we became them.”

“I don’t care about all these stories. I want to know where Michael is.”

Nevitsky looked at her and said, “I will try to help.”

He went into another room and made a phone call. Monica could hear him talking on the phone. She heard Nevitsky yell over the phone, “It doesn’t matter. We’ve already lost. We finally lost to the Soviets. Just tell me you’ll help.”

Monica sat in the nicely decorated room with an old grand piano and black and white pictures of people long dead. She didn’t understand Nevitsky. Nevitsky was a great man who conquered the world. He was a man with a long history of rewards and power. He had dined with famous people all over the world. Monica was just an awkward girl from some nameless town that no one cared about. She had an IT degree from a state university and had never won awards her whole life.

When Nevitsky reentered the room Monica said, “Why are you helping me? I’m just a little nothing of a human.”

Nevitsky replied, “No, you aren’t little. A little person would never bolt into my house demanding to know the truth. You may not be one of the elite, but you have the determination of a warrior, and the elite cannot exist without warriors.”

“What is the news?” She felt terrible inside. She needed another Xanax. She felt out of control. She felt powerless. The only thing keeping her together was the gun under her coat.

Nevitsky said, “I have someone who can help you. He knows the secret you are seeking. I didn’t ask him what the secret was. I am too old to care about such things anymore.”

Monica looked at Nevitsky and said, “Thank you.”

Nevitsky handed her a piece of paper. “This man will be at this diner in this location at this time. Do not miss it. He will be wearing a cowboy hat. He’s in his forties. Do not pull a gun on him. He is a trained CIA agent and will be able to disarm you and kill you so fast you won’t even know that you died.” Nevitsky paused. “I now end my life as a criminal. All my life I have fought against criminal behavior and now, in my last days, I will die a criminal.”

“Maybe being a criminal isn’t that bad after all,” Monica said.

Dr. Charles Nevitsky poured himself another scotch, sat down in his favorite chair, and stared out the window at the wind blowing the colored leaves of the trees. He did not smile. He did not sigh. He just looked.

Monica was sitting at a Starbucks. She had stopped in some nameless town in Oklahoma to rest from driving and check her email. She felt depressed about leaving her father. She kept thinking of him walking around the house alone. She would often cook him meals, tuna fish and noodles, shit on a shingle, macaroni and cheese mixed with ground chuck. Then they would sit together and eat those meals talking about the days they’d had. She would wash his clothes and help him weed-whack the lawn because he had allergies and the weed-whacking made him sneeze a lot. She thought about all of his little habits, from drinking too much coffee to eating an excess of powdered donuts, to leaving barely any orange juice and milk left in the cartons and putting them back in the refrigerator anyway. She loved how he watched baseball games from beginning to end. Even though she did not love baseball, she would pretend she liked it so as not to upset him. She felt worried about him.

As she was sitting there, secluded in a sad daydream about her father, a woman sat across from her at the table. Monica realized she knew who she was. It was Ashley, the woman who read Sherwood Burke’s poem at the Protest 2.0 meeting. Monica felt extremely confused and said, “Ashley?”

“Yes, from the meeting.”

“Yeah,” Monica said.

“I have a new email.”

“Wait, how did you know I was here?”

“I have my sources.”

“You have sources?”

“Yes, but so do you,” Ashley said.

“Do we have the same sources?”

“No, but they’re similar in form and function.”

“Okay.” Monica wanted to go back to daydreaming about her dad, but she knew that Ashley must have something to tell her, or she wouldn’t have taken the time to find her in the middle of Oklahoma.

Ashley said, “I have a new email. It is Sherwood Burke’s Talking Points.”

“Burke has Talking Points?”

“Yes, in the past it would have been called a manifesto, an ideology, or even a treatise, but today ideas are called Talking Points.”

“Show me the email.”

Ashley took her laptop and went to her email and pulled up Burke’s email and showed it to Monica. As Monica read, Ashley sipped on a chai and stared into space politely.

I, Sherwood Burke, propose a new government, a new paradigm, a new mode of living that will make all Americans happy, I will give them what they want, because I am the Last True Democrat!

These facts were revealed to me and I consider them the most important facts:

1: People of the lower-uneducated-classes are having children at a higher rate than people from the middle to upper-educated-classes. The educated classes are only having babies at a.5 percent level but the people from the lower classes are having babies at an astounding 3.7 percent level, which implies that in thirty years the uneducated rabble of society will be the dominant majority in America. We must prepare a way for them to live!

2: Americans are fat. We must make a way for them to stop consuming disgusting food and not exercising.

3. The United States government spent sixty-six billion dollars on a plane called the Taradactle 24, which did not work, and there was zero demand for the production of the aircraft. It was only made because a company gave campaign donations to politicians, which got them voted in, which led to the politicians voting in legislation to have it made. It was a sixty-six billion dollar scam. During this same time in legislative history the congress voted to decrease funding to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC performs a vital function. Our politicians are more concerned with their campaign donations than with the health of its citizens, therefore it is no longer a legitimate government.

WHAT WE NEED NOW

Destruction of quick and easy transportation by cars and trucks!

It will destroy nationwide corporations that depend on the highway system and the automobile. Without the automobile, states will be forced to be more isolated in their economic activities and will have to depend on their own resources and not the resources of other states and countries to survive. This will lead to the growth of local cultures and economies.

This will make everyone happy but the only way we can achieve this is by throwing off the chains of the automobile and the interstate highway system. The logic is sound. If we take away automobiles then Americans will be forced to become more local and more sustainable in their behaviors.

In thirty and especially in fifty years the educated class will become so small that they will need to become like the monks and nuns of the Dark Ages. The creation of the monasteries and convents in the Dark and Middle Ages was because the educated became so few after the collapse of the Roman Empire that they realized they were outnumbered and were not the majority. The majority was the rabble plowing the fields and slaughtering the goats. They realized that they did not matter.

This is the new plan, the new dream, we can still have democracy, checks and balances and a president, I don’t care, but THE AUTOMOBILE MUST GO!