Motto:
"WANT IS WEALTH
POVERTY IS PROSPERITY
SQUALOR IS LUXURY"

Millicent was happy. Her donor kidney had arrived at hospital, and she was in a taxi, on her way to have the transplant operation.

She felt a dribble on her head, and looked up. There was a hole in the taxi's roof. But she wasn't in a taxi. Then she came fully awake. There was rain coming in through a hole in the cardboard box she had scrounged to sleep under last night. A thin gray dawn was visible beyond the raindrops coming down. Then the dull stabbing pain in her side started afresh.

Millicent shrugged out of the soggy cardboard scraps and struggled to her feet. Her clothes were tattered and dirty, but the government consignment shop didn't have anything she could afford. Not that she could afford much of anything anymore.

A month ago, her kidney condition had become acute. The HHS emergency room she had walked to – almost no one drove, petrochemicals were frowned on by the state, and almost all vehicles had been requisitioned by the government – was stuffy, with peeling paint on the walls, reeking of urine, sweat, and worse from people who had been waiting for days to get medical help. She was lucky; on her second day she fainted, and some hours later a young intern awakened her with smelling salts. “Whadaya need?”, he had asked.

“My kidney – left – bad, been that way for nearly a year”, Millicent told him, hungry, thirsty, and aching everywhere.

Millicent gave her name and ID number. The intern scrawled it and some other information on a clipboard he carried and started to move away. “What about my kidney?”, Millicent asked.

“Come back next Tuesday and go to the second floor clinic. I'll put a note in for a doctor. Take these pills.” The intern fished a bottle out of his pocket, threw it towards Millicent, then turned to another sleeper without seeing if she caught the bottle.

“But that's six days from now!”, Millicent said plaintively. The intern didn't acknowledge her. She looked at the bottle. Aspirin.

That week, Millicent was unable to show up for her government clerk-typist job. It wasn't much, not like the position she enjoyed before the company she had worked for was shut down for failing to meet government guidelines, but at least it allowed her to eek out a living. She smiled. She was still better off than most of her acquaintances. At least she had a place to go during the days, where she worked in a useful if not satisfying position, and a one-room HUD apartment she didn't share with anyone else. But she had missed a week of work, between the two days waiting to see a doctor that had proven unsuccessful and the four days it took her to recover from the experience.

When she went back to work the following Monday, her supervisor asked what happened, and she explained.

“Where's your doctor's note?”, the super asked.

“But that's what I'm trying to tell you. I wasn't able to see a doctor!”

“Get to work”, the super said. “You've got a lot of catching up to do. The work doesn't do itself, you know. I'll deal with you later.”

But he didn't. Millicent had not completely recovered, and when she was unable to find her supervisor to tell him she needed to go home, she told her cubemate to let him know. She had tried to leave him a voicemail but his voicemail was full. She couldn't send an email – her work email account was read-only and her Internet access at home had been turned off, while she was under investigation by FCC agents for some inappropriate posts she had made on a suspected subversive Website. Millicent's landline had been deactivated at the same time as her Internet access, ostensibly for the same reason. Cell phones and smartphones had been banned several months ago by HHS. They caused cancer. Only high-level officials and peacekeepers had access to them. At least she wasn't hassled by telemarketers – not that there were any left; their firms had gone bankrupt with the economy. But that was good too; fewer greedy capitalists, thought Millicent.

The next day she went to the HHS clinic to see the doctor the intern had mentioned. But no one had any record that she was supposed to see anyone. After a fruitless day with still no doctor visit, she went to her flat and collapsed, exhausted. She could have used a cold drink but the EPA had banned all non-government refrigerant usage the previous year. Refrigerants were bad for the environment. She became chilly at night, but the apartment house she lived in didn't have any heating fuel. The allotted ration hadn't made it to the building that month. So she pulled another threadbare blanket around her and shivered until the morning.

When she arrived at work, her supervisor called her in to his cube. “Millicent, you're being placed on unpaid leave for the indefinite future.”

“But why? I'm one of the fastest typists, and one of the most accurate, too. You told me so yourself in my last review!”

“Yes, but your performance has really been slacking off, and you've been missing too many days of work. Plus the investigation on you looks bad for the department. My manager decided it would be better to give you leave until we can clear things up here.”

“But you know I've been sick, and I'm a loyal dues-paying Party member, and I've never done anything subversive; the FCC has copies of all my posts! The DoJ hadn't even ruled on that phrase when I posted it.”

“Sorry, Missy.” She hated to be called that. It made her think of Miss, and Misses, and who was he to use those sexist labels? “You of all people, in your position in our department, should know about retroactive changes. The decision is made. You have fifteen minutes to fetch your belongings. Off you go.”

Three weeks later, a HUD moving crew came to her flat. “You must have a wrong address”, Millicent told the disinterested men. “I have a lease here.”

The lead man pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket, stabbed his finger at it, shoved it toward her face. “This your address?”, he asked gruffly.

“Yes –“

“We have orders to get the current occupant out and get a new one in. That's all I know. Take it up with the local HUD office if you've got questions.”

“But where are you taking my things?”, Millicent asked as the men started heaving her items into a shabby moving truck.

“Go see HUD”, was the only reply.

Millicent found a public phone at a local Reading Center amid the pamphlets and used most of the last of her change to place a call to the local HUD office she found in the dog-eared phone book the proprietor produced. After two hours of roboannouncements and transfers to various clerks she was told, with finality, “You have to come in person.” After all, the official thought as he hung up, we can't waste our time on the phone with just anyone.

It took Millicent most of the rest of the day to walk to the HUD building. It was on the outskirts of the city at the opposite end of town from where she had, up until today, lived. She'd had to sell her bicycle the previous week to buy some food. By the time she queued up to a clerk's window she was exhausted and felt like the world had taken up a heavy residence on her shoulders. The woman behind the window glanced up crossly. Millicent explained her situation. The clerk checked her computer. “Yes… There's a productive Party member who's slated to take over the flat. His dues are current, and he has a steady job, so he can pay the rent.”

“But I've been sick… I'm on leave without pay… And I have a lease! You can't do this to me!”

“Dearie, I haven't done anything to you. I'm just telling you the way things are. Now run along. I'm busy.”

“I need a place to stay –“

The clerk shuffled through several folders and produced a sheaf of papers. She pushed them under the window that separated them. “Fill out these forms and bring them back tomorrow.”

Millicent realized on her way out that she had forgotten to ask how to reclaim her belongings. She turned round to re-enter the building, but the guard at the door stopped her. "Closed, ma'am. You'll have to move along."

None of Millicent's friends had room to spare. One gave her a loaf of bread. “Sorry, it's all I can give you; my family doesn't have enough but I know you must be hungry”, David told her.

Millicent spent that night under a bridge. The day after she found a place in an abandoned warehouse, but the next night, after having fruitlessly spent a third day at the Housing Ministry trying to get a place to stay, she found that a family had occupied it. That was when she scavenged her cardboard box and huddled under it next to a building. But now her box, too, was gone, ruined by the rain.

Millicent grimly started walking the four blocks through the rain to get to the line she knew circled the building that was the FDA soup kitchen. It had just been reopened after being closed for almost a month while a suspicious shipment of beets to the facility was investigated. She grimaced to herself. Soup kitchen. Of course no one called it that, officially. It was an FDA-supervised Meal Preparation Center. But in one of her blogs, months ago, she had the temerity to write about it and had called it a soup kitchen. That was what everyone in her department called it, but only among themselves, and never in written form. That was what had started her trouble with the FCC. Millicent hadn't even known about the filing that the DoJ had made the month following, pertaining not only from that time on but to all prior documentation, stating any reference to a government institution by anything other than its given name constituted hate speech. It had seemed so petty at the time. Now she knew it wasn't. The term she used was criminal.

Her stomach was growling, and she was looking forward to the cabbage broth the FDA workers slopped in the almost-clean tins. Some pre-teen boys wandering in the street took notice of her solitary figure and began taunting her. “Yo momma, got any food?”, one of the boys leered at her. Another tripped her deftly from behind as she tried to pass by. Millicent went down hard on her knees, adding new pain to that in her side. The boys laughed raucously and moved on. Millicent pulled herself up and mumbled a quiet prayer of thanks to Dear Leader – At least these boys hadn't wanted any more, unlike the gang last week. But now her knees were bleeding, and she didn't understand why the blood kept trickling from them.

Down the rain-drenched street she walked. Maybe, she hoped, maybe after I eat I can find a doctor. Gaia knows I need one.

Her problems are all George Bush's fault. Isn't it obvious?

The woman is obviously a subversive and probably old as well, and therefore not a contributing member of society.

She will be dealt with accordingly.

The future is what we make it, comrades, and fortunately Dear Leader has it all under control.

Dear Leader was very happy to set up those Google Alerts when it let him capture subversive proles like this.

R.O.C.K. in the USSA wrote:The future is what we make it, comrades, and fortunately Dear Leader has it all under control.

R.O.C.K., you are obviously Korrekt. If only Millicent would open her eyes and look around her, she would be able to perceive the beautiful world Dear 0'Leader is creating for her even now.

(By the way, I imagine Millicent as about 30, but in poor health due to her inKorrekt attitudes and lack of faith. This does not excuse or mitigate her drain on society. But we are dealing with her, comrade. Oh Yes We Can™!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... syzRUKwgng

Vrag Naroda wrote:

Vrag, ever get that
sinking
feeling
...?
It's
the
pits.