Echo

same old thing. His mother, one of the four million polio victims in the United States from the epidemic of 2018, frequently tried unsuccessfully to convince his father to relocate. She dreamed about better healthcare and quality of life in a less populated area. Like Sussex County.
    His big sister, Abby, a dialysis patient, needed to get to the hospital three times a week. As a toddler, she developed chronic kidney disease, acute and undoubtedly fatal, requiring her to go in and out of hospitals since a baby. She really needed a kidney transplant but they didn’t have the money to buy one from China or South America like most patients of loftier financial means.
    When the country decided to worship at the altar of socialized medicine, an understandably desperate shortage of doctors ensued. Over utilized emergency rooms with a standard back up of 36 hours on any normal day before the polio epidemic, suddenly morphed into requiring an appointment to get in. Dying before your appointment became common, creating a huge underground market, selling your appointment to the highest bidder. Family allowances limited the amount of doctor visits per year. Inevitably, rationing became as necessary as breathing.
    Simple sore throats or innocuous coughs, easily overlooked by busy adults trying to avoid burning a valuable medical visit, still spread germs. Unfortunately, polio was highly contagious. An airline passenger can infect an entire plane with one phlegmy throat. The government burden of bloated bureaucracy put the final nail in that coffin.
    The epidemic started because of a Muslim law, passed in 2005, in Northern Nigeria. They issued an Islamic Fatwa, declaring the polio vaccine part of a secret conspiracy by the United States and the United Nations against the Muslim faith. Their claim declared that the vaccine drops, secretly designed to sterilize the Muslim true believers, stimulated the virus. It then reappeared in Nigeria and spread throughout Africa. In this world of high-speed airline transportation it didn’t take long. Legal immigration figures show the number one source of immigrants in the good ol’ U.S.A. to be from Africa. And who could blame them.
    Amazingly, the United States, no longer the current super power, continued to draw the poor from all over the world as the land of milk and honey. In reality, it subsisted as the land of the free lunch. All U.S. border states now insisted on fences and guards. No longer could anyone jump the fence . The problem of illegal immigration, so obviously out of control in the second decade, forced the Socialist Democrats to finally acquiesce. Their mission accomplished, their aim to amass enough constituents to vote them into power for perpetuity, could stop.
    The Socialist Democrat Party now exercised iron control of the government. The exceptionalism of The United States started its decline long ago when the masses realized they could use their vote to elect officials willing to rape the country in their efforts to sell their influence in return for votes. So they just voted for the politician and party that promised them the most swag. They didn’t care that someone must inevitably pay for it, as long as it wasn’t them.
    As a result, availability of capital to grow the private sector diminished. Small business suffered and disappeared. Taxes shot through the roof. Large corporations left the country along with the wealthy. Hollywood elite baled quickly, France, London and Mexico their preferred destinations. A pound of chopped meat in a grocery store (if you could find it on the shelf) now cost $33.00 a pound. And it was mostly pink slime fillers at that. Thank heavens for food stamps.
    The country now consisted of the unexceptional, the undereducated, the unemployable and the irrational. Oh, and the lazy, can’t forget the lazy. Birth control now remained a nasty word. The Socialist Democrats pushed it hoping to reduce poor populations, yet the poor refused to take it. Who wanted to give up the opportunity for another welfare check? The country, no longer a melting pot, became a country of fighting tribal factions and competing ideologies. The Socialist Democrat Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Green and the smaller Republican Party perpetually slandered each other in their quest to control what remained of the country.
    The Socialist Democrat Party, made up of African Americans, highly paid union workers and ex-illegal’s (45 million added to the Medicaid