The Murder years: Chapter 1

What if I told you that way, way in the future, death was a completely different idea from what it is now? No, seriously. What if I said that, in a few hundred years, people didn't die from natural causes anymore? That we'd eliminated all diseases from American living, cured cancer, cured AIDS, EVERYTHING. And the only ways to kill yourself were murder, suicide, and accidents?

 

What if I said you could theoretically live forever? What would you do?

 

Believe it or not, most people don't choose to live forever. The life expectancy rate has obviously gone up from a physical point of view ("forever" is definitely a lot longer than "uh, we dunno, maybe a hundred years?") but most people don't typically make it past a hundred, even today. And it's for a lot of reasons; maybe all your friends have died off and you just don't want to live anymore without them. Maybe you feel like you've seen enough of this life and are ready to move on (assuming there is a "moving on"; we still haven't figured that out yet, but we've come close a couple times). Maybe you had a lot of valuables in your house and an easily picked lock on your front door. Anything could happen.

 

I guess if you think about it we've solved a lot of the problems here in America. Obesity is gone. Health care is universal. Gay marriage is totally legal. We solved the energy crisis. We subsidized farms, and now you don't have to pay for groceries anymore if you're cool with whatever the government gives you (which does not include junk food, unfortunately). We legalized marijuana, and even eliminated the drinking age. People as young as sixteen can vote now. You can marry your first cousin almost anywhere in the country. Oh the times, they are a-changing. You're welcome.

 

The only problem we haven't quite figured out yet is the crime rate. But we're getting there.

 

You see, one of the biggest problems we had in our country, particularly after we cured all those diseases I told you we cured, was overpopulation. Big time. 97.6% of the people living on the whole PLANET lived in the United States. Citizens were having babies left and right that would never die, and our immigration problem got out of control. People were coming and never going. Even rural areas became crowded. People were willingly living in Montana. It was nuts. But the government had a plan. A plan nobody thought would work, but a plan. And it worked. Maybe a little too well.

 

It was a two-step plan. Step one: Build a dome. Over the whole country. I know what you're thinking; that's ridiculous. And it was. And it took decades for this crazy idea to pass. But it did. And it worked.

 

The Dome was basically like if the Wall in Texas and Science had a baby. It was the most technologically advanced thing of its time. Completely transparent, it spanned the whole of the continental United States (and eventually Alaska and Hawaii had their own Domes installed). I guess it's less of a wall though and more of a semi-permeable membrane. Things can go out without issue, but they need clearance to come in. And I don't just mean a passport; their DNA has to be pre-programmed into the Dome's system. That took a lot of trial and error to perfect; we had a really bad bird problem around the Dome during migration season.

 

But it's more or less perfect now; air and water can pass in and out without problem (although they are heavily filtered for unwelcome microbes), and certain animals can come and go as they please. Animals that weren't supposed to be in the States, like stinkbugs and certain breeds of rats and roaches, were no longer welcome. People did not have clearance to come in. That stopped the immigration problem pretty quickly...but we had a pretty big people problem during migration season for a while, too. It was on the news every day for months after it started being a problem. But the media stopped reporting it eventually, and we stopped really caring.

 

But I guess, you've seen one electrocuted to shit dead body, you've seen 'em all, right? That's certainly what the media thought.

 

And I know what you're thinking: Okay, you stopped people from coming in if you didn't want them, but what about the billions of people already living in the United States? How'd you get rid of them? Well, that's where Step 2 came in. You might wanna sit down for this one.

 

Step 2 of the Population Management Act was to...slightly tweak the homicide laws. And by that, I mean, virtually eliminate them. Yeah. Basically it became totally legal to kill people.

 

I know what you're thinking: That's even more insane than The Dome! And it was. But it worked.

 

The details of the Murder Laws (as they are called outside of Congress) are a bit fuzzy to the typical citizen, but basically it decriminalized murder, along with increasing the availability of weapons, poisons, basically all the things you need to kill people. People who were already in prison for murder were not released, but if you killed somebody after the law passed? You were free to go. No jail time, no courts, not even an arrest. And things went exactly as everyone imagined they would: The States dissolved into anarchy.

 

At least, at first.

 

For a while, everything was chaos. Dead bodies lined the streets in the denser cities, from homeless people to bankers. Surprisingly enough, women and children were typically left alone. But men? Fuck those guys, right? That's what everyone else apparently thought. But according to the law, anybody was fair game. And I do mean anybody.

 

That was the main problem with The Murder Laws, and the main clause that Congress failed to overlook. They never thought We The People would go after them.

 

I'm guessing Congress felt that they were so important and so well-protected that once the Law passed, they could just sit back and watch the rest of us get all Hunger Games on each other until the population was reasonable enough that the law could be repealed. That was what they THOUGHT. And they thought wrong...way wrong. Within days, assassinations were practically the only thing you'd see on the news. Half of the Senate was dead by the end of the first week. Over two-thirds of the House of Representatives were gone. The President, and Vice President, were both killed. Our entire government collapsed.

 

A lot of important Republicans and Democrats were killed, almost eliminating both parties altogether. During that time, a couple other parties started rising to power. One was the Green Party, which a lot of people were actually pretty excited about. The other was the Libertarian Party, which even more people were excited about until they learned what a Libertarian actually was.

 

We held a new election, and a Libertarian became the new President. He chose a Green VP though. We had the best of both worlds, I guess you could say.

 

New Congressmen (and women) were put into office. With all those old white farts out of the way, our Congress quickly became colored; blacks, hispanics, asians, gay people, straight people, trans* people, men, women anybody and everybody had the chance. For once, we were all equal.

 

It took five years for everything to sort itself out. In those five years, over half the population was eliminated. Surprisingly, almost all of that half were older, white men. Bankers, politicians, if you wore a white collar, you were in danger. Nobody could have predicted that. But it happened.

 

By the time the new President took office, our population was cut in half, but the half that remained were young, hardy, and prepared to change the world. We were a country made new, made new by half a decade of massacres we would refer to from that point on as The Murder Years.

 

We were a country made new. And a perfect country. All it took was being able to legally kill off half its people for five long years.

 

Obviously a lot of people were really upset about this, not just in America, but all over the world. We were named cruel,  a horrible, monsterous country with no shame and no moral compass. How could we just kill off so many people? Who the hell did we think we were? But nobody could disagree when asked if the country was made better as a result. We were diverse. We were welcoming, and kind. The era of old white men running the country was over, because all the old white men were dead. And we killed them. And we weren't even sorry about it.

 

But that was a long time ago. I wasn't even alive during The Murder Years. That was almost fifty years ago. Now we live in a sort of utopia, where The Dome keeps us safe and where population remains under control. We power our homes with solar and wind energy; we don't use cars that guzzle gas, but electric-powered bullet trains and motor bikes. Or we walk, if the distance is short enough.

 

Our food is regulated based on rigorous yearly physicals that measure our weight and health, and shipped to our house once a month. Pre-made, pre-portioned, pre-everything. All we have to do is heat it up. Every day for an hour, people are require to exercise. If the weather permits, we are required to do it outside. Parks started popping back up all over the country. Urban areas were no longer the ugly, gray jungles they appear to be in the history books. Schools are more diverse; we have just as much emphasis on math and science as we do on art and music. Everyone speaks a foreign language; Spanish in the south, French or Italian in the north. We learned about history, hoping it would never repeat itself. We teach our children to explore both their gender and their sexuality. There is health coverage for sex reassignment surgery. We are healthy, happy, and no longer obese. We are cultural, educated, well-rounded individuals. And nobody is poor.

 

Our freedoms are still in place, although religious practice has all but disappeare in America. The major religion, if you can call it that, is Atheism. We believe in science, not magic or God. But the religious minority are no longer discriminated against. Although, Christianity tends to be frowned upon. It was, after all, white Christian males that decided we needed The Murder Years in order to rebound from our economic, cultural, and generally all-around slump.

 

Don't get me wrong, they were right, but they probably could have come up with something slightly more ethical if they'd thought a little harder about it. Like...anything really would have been more ethical than what they did.

 

But still, things are pretty great now. Despite the obvious prejudice of older white folk of days gone by, we don't really worry about them anymore. No one group of people acts any better than the other. We just go about our business without a single ounce of "give-a-shit" for our fellow man. Live and let live; a saying that, perhaps, trickled its way to use via The Murder Years. We want to live. That's all we want to do.

 

And we do. We live great.

 

There are a lot of things that HAVEN'T really changed since The Murder Years, and the times before. We don't have flying cars yet (sorry). We still eat junk food, although Post-TMY laws were put in place to improve the quality of said junk food so it's not QUITE as bad for us as it used to be. Teenagers still hate their parents. Old people still can't drive for shit. Everybody still goes to school (although education has changed a little since your time). New York City is still full of assholes. Some things will never change, I guess.

 

Take me, for example. I'm just your typical teen. I get acne, I hate waking up before noon, I go to school. I'm hoping to get my driver's license in the next few months. I have friends. I'm probably not that different from you. Except, you know, I live in a world where killing people is legal.

 

Yeah. We never actually REPEALED that law. We just kind of...tweaked it, a little.

 

You see, remember when I told you the President who took over during TMY was a Libertarian? Well, I probably failed to mention that he actually SUPPORTED The Murder Laws. Like a lot. You see, he's an anarchist. I know, I know, an anarchist becoming President of the United States? I'm not shitting you. I wish I was.