The End of America

by Pete Thorsen

  And if you are going to treat all Americans like they are terrorists you better have plenty of guns, ammunition, and military hardware. So part of the wonderful Patriot Act gives plenty of money to all law enforcement agencies so they can beef up their hardware with military weapons including full automatic weapons, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, assorted high-tech gear, and training in military tactics. All of which are to be used solely on American citizens not against people in other countries.

  Plus you will want to know what every American citizen is doing, and saying, and typing, and buying so enter the National Security Agency. They listen to and record every telephone conversation both cell phone and land line phone. They listen to and record every radio transmission. They read and record every email, every tweet, every Face Book posting, and every internet forum posting. They watch US citizens with every digital camera in the United States.

  All traffic cameras, all city surveillance cameras, all business surveillance cameras anywhere in the country, and all cell phone cameras, laptop cameras, any camera that has an internet connection. And they know who they are looking at with facial recognition software. And every transaction anywhere is recorded from any bank, any store, any internet sale, everywhere except that two dollar cash sale at your yard sale.

  You can still send a private letter to someone and the government will likely not open it and read it but all US mail is scanned. It is scanned and the complete to and from addresses are recorded. So they might not know what you sent exactly but they do know you sent it and when and how much it weighed and who you sent it to.

  And it is all recorded forever. This is a massive, unbelievable amount of information. It is so much information that it is basically impossible to comprehend. How can they process and store all this information? Well they need a lot of very high speed computers and they need a lot of digital storage capacity. So the NSA built a new facility in Utah.

  Most of this stuff is of course classified but we do know a little about this new compound the government built. The structures built there are naturally huge and they encompass many acres of land (with room to expand). The cost to just build the main structures was at least one and a half billion dollars and many estimates went way higher than that.

  Then you still need the all the hardware and software and other stuff inside these buildings which was estimated to cost way more than the structures themselves. The exact amounts are all classified of course. It is expected to use enough electrical power to light up a city. And use almost two million gallons of water per DAY just to help cool the computers alone.

  As you can see I have a lot to gripe about and this is just the tip of the iceberg so-to-speak. And this stuff is nothing new but it is building in intensity and scope. Yes I know the old days are gone and are not coming back. The world has changed and this great nation has changed.

  The difference is the world has changed but hasn’t it really gotten worse? This nation has changed and it has definitely gotten worse. I guess I should describe myself some so you can see my background and where I’m coming from.

  Chapter Two

  My name is Gilbert Manning. I live here in Minnesota with my wife Flo. We have twin daughters that have since married and moved out. It looks like they moved as far away from us as they possibly could but we do get along just fine. It happened that their husbands and the girls all found good jobs that were far away from here.

  Ava is in Atlanta and Amy is in Los Angeles. But they are happy in their jobs and marriages so all is well. Flo and I own our place outright. It is the family farm where I grew up with my parents and my brother Wilber.

  I have had some tragedies in my life. My brother joined the Army after high school and would likely have made it a career but for the fact that he was killed not in any war but in a simple training accident. Then it wasn’t long after that event when my parents were killed in a home invasion gone bad.

  So with no one left in my family I inherited the family farm. When my kids got in high school I sold off a few acres of the property to get enough money to send my two daughters to college. I have done no farming but I do rent out as much of the land as I can to a neighbor who grows crops on it.

  This rental money helps pay the considerable property taxes and I get a break on the taxes because it is active agricultural land. We do grow a garden every year for our own consumption. It helps keep Flo busy and saves us a lot of money on food. Plus we are very likely getting much safer vegetables too.

  A few years ago we planted some apple trees. It takes awhile before they produce but this year they each had a few apples on them. Next year I would expect them to produce more though it will be some time yet before they reach their peak. There are natural blueberry bushes on the edge of our small woods and we pick all of those as we can.

  There are also black berry and raspberry bushes that we get some berries from. Sometimes we pick pin cherries that grow on one of the neighbor’s places. They are natural here and the neighbors don’t use them at all. Flo makes jelly from them but I just eat them.

  I never was in the military and I never went to college. After high school I went to work. Mostly construction jobs then about fifteen years ago I got a maintenance man job at the local old folk’s home. After working there five years I was promoted to head of maintenance. Which job and title I still have.

  Flo worked out in an office when we got married but stopped working with the birth of our first daughter. She sometimes talks about going back to work now but we both know it would be a hard transition after not working for so many years. Plus jobs are not very common either.

  We get by just fine with what I make so it has never been an issue. It sure helped that we never had a house payment or rent payment all of our lives. I sure don’t make a ton of money but we lead a simple and frugal life. The farm has several buildings that we have no use for except for storage. And they are all full of stuff. I have always been a scrounger or scavenger and brought a lot of stuff home through the years. It is possible some of it is valuable as antiques by now. I just tell Flo it is my retirement fund.

  I have no pension at work. I do have an IRA and of course when I retire I will get Social Security. If things stay the same it will be enough. We are not big spenders now and don’t mind being frugal. But it will be awhile until I am old enough to retire because I am fifty nine right now. So I got about four more years to work.

  We do have a savings account and I put a little in out of each check. If I lost my job we would be in trouble but not near as bad as most folks. Sure our savings would last awhile and likely last until I could start getting Social Security. Good thing too because where would a fifty nine year old man get a job? Jobs are very few and far between right now and I don’t see any improvement down the road.

  The government keeps saying that the unemployment rate is getting better all the time but no one in the real world believes that for a minute. There are very few jobs and many applicants for each one that does open up. I am very lucky with my job because we both are on the health insurance through work and it is good insurance.

  The company I work for pays most of the premiums and we only pay a hundred dollars a month total. If I lost my job we would lose that insurance and we could not afford to pay the whole premium. But I am a good employee and my job is secure so there is little to worry about there. At least I hope so anyway.

  The Affordable Health Care Act has started to take effect now and it is a royal fiasco. It was supposed to lower premiums for everyone and get thirty million more on health care insurance that do not have insurance now. What a joke. Even though this was passed three years ago nothing was ready. What did the government do for those three years?

  First thing was six to ten million got notices that they were losing their existing health insurance and they were supposed to sign up for the ‘new’ and improved health insurance. But they couldn’t because the sign-up website did not work. You could call in but the worker on the pho
ne still had to punch your information in at the same website so it still was a no go.

  After two months they got some of the website up and working. But the prices were huge. If the premium was low the deductible was huge. Some people got subsidized premiums but that just added to our well over seventeen trillion dollar national debt. And many lower income people could not buy insurance; the government would not let them buy insurance they automatically got signed up for Medicaid whether they wanted it or not.

  Some states had a freeze on Medicaid in their state so were not taking any new ones on. Those people then went into limbo, no Medicaid and they could not buy their own insurance. Most who signed up got put on Medicaid. This put a huge burden on the already financially strapped states and also added more to the national debt. So far this Affordable Health Care Act has had no effect on my health insurance from work. I sure hope it stays that way.

  I used to hunt years back but had not done so for many years. I still had my hunting guns and this year I bought a hunting license for deer. Meat is getting so expensive I only did it to save money and provide us with fresh lean meat.

  It was not much of a hunt. I only went about a hundred yards from the house and picked out the biggest doe in the bunch in our field I saw on opening day. I shot only once and gutted the deer out and hung it from a tree in the yard and skun it out. The next day I quartered it and then cut it up with Flo wrapping it in freezer paper. All the scrap pieces of meat I brought in and the grocery store ground it up to hamburger and wrapped it in one pound packages for me. They never charged me anything for doing it. Of course we have been shopping in the same store for many years and know most all the employees there.

  I think we got about fifty pounds or so of boneless meat for the cost of a deer license. I never knew you were supposed to take your deer in to be ‘registered’. Well too late now because the deer is cut up, wrapped, and in the freezer.

  We still have two vehicles, a car and a pickup but I am considering selling one of them to cut down on expenses. We really do not need two vehicles but for right now we will keep them both. Both are older and would not net us much money, mainly just save on insurance and license tags.

  I got a small raise at work today. It was small but still appreciated and it kinda surprised me to get any raise at all with the hard times right now. Inflation is up though it is never mentioned on the news. But we do not need the news to tell us that groceries cost more because we buy them every week and can plainly see the higher prices.

  Thank goodness that we made the pre-buy on propane last fall. It has more than doubled in price. We should have plenty left on the pre-buy to get us through the next month or so of winter here. Hopefully it will drop back down over summer when no one is using it. We still have the old wood stove even though we have not used it in several years. One of the sheds still has a lot of firewood inside. I sure hope I don’t have to go back to heating with wood, which is young man’s work.

  Chapter Three

  We planted a little bigger garden this year. I just got a bad feeling about how everything is going. At least we can grow our own food. The venison from last fall is about gone. This fall if they still let you take more than one deer, I’m going to try to shoot two. Two deer would supply quite a bit of meat for us.

  Last winter I snared a couple of rabbits, mainly just to see if I still remembered how. They tasted just fine and gave us a break from eating venison. I don’t know what the laws are on snaring rabbits and I really don’t care. It is easy to see their trails in the snow and the snares make no noise like shooting them would. Next winter we might be eating more rabbits. Seems like my old uncle used to trap pheasants but I’ll have to try to remember how he did that.

  Gas has sure gone up and I’m thankful we don’t live farther away from town. I’ve been driving our car to work instead of my pickup to save on gas. Supposedly the United States is producing more of its own oil now with all that oil coming out of North Dakota but gas prices are sure going up anyways. It was five nineteen a gallon when I filled up yesterday. I noticed that diesel fuel is going up much slower but it was four eighty two a gallon. As diesel goes up the price of everything and especially food will rise also. I’m sure glad we enlarged the garden.

  Even on the news they finally said that unemployment was going up. At the same time they said that retail sales were dropping. Well that is hardly surprising; if you are not working you have no money to spend shopping. Food stamps have hit another record high with over sixty five million now on food stamps. Many states including Minnesota are really struggling financially.

  So many are on Medicaid now it is huge drain. Many in the Legislature here are saying we have to put a freeze on new Medicaid enrollees but so far the Democrats who hold control have not done anything about it. They haven’t done anything about the state pension either and it is just getting in worse financial shape every day.

  Minneapolis is now openly talking about a possible bankruptcy. Many cities and counties throughout the nation either are filing or certainly thinking about it. With retail sales going down that means less sales taxes to cities and states. The federal government can just print more money but local governments can not do that. They can only raise taxes or cut services. With the whole economy in the dumps I would think no one would consider raising taxes.

  Our propane supplier called today and said we should fill our tank now. They expect propane to be very high this winter with rationing very likely. There will be no pre-buy available and the lowest price is for sure right now. I asked about getting a bigger tank or a second tank and they said they could bring out a second tank but I would have to fill it when it was hooked up. I agreed and arrangements were made for delivery of the second tank and then filling of both tanks.

  Even with the two tanks we would not have enough gas to get through the winter. It takes a lot of propane to heat a house in the Minnesota winter. We had a five hundred gallon tank and the new one was also a five hundred gallon. We had some fuel left in our existing tank and they can only fill them to eighty percent full to allow for expansion.

  So we would have to pay for about seven hundred gallons of propane and a forty five dollar hook up fee on the new tank (there was no charge for the tank itself, we are just leasing it). The current delivered price of the propane is four dollars and ten cents per gallon times seven hundred gallons plus the forty five hook up is twenty nine hundred fifteen dollars. That is a chunk of money all at once but that is why we have the savings account.

  Thank goodness the garden was a good producer this year because food prices are steadily going up along with fuel prices. Flo and I talked it over and we took some money out of our savings account and bought a lot of food that would keep. We were getting one quarter of one percent interest on the savings account and food is going up every week so we are much better off buying the food now and storing it.

  We had to stack a lot of the food in one of the spare rooms as the pantry filled up fast with all that Flo had canned out of our garden. We also saved a lot of seeds from our garden this year. We might not use them but so many of the common things in the grocery store are so often out of stock we are afraid seeds might not be available either when we want some.

  At a yard sale I got a couple more electric heaters. With propane so high we might be just as cheap to use some electric heat. I am also putting plastic over some of the windows on the house and we are closing off several rooms so we don’t have to heat areas we don’t go into.

  Flo has been watching all the grocery store ads and when something looks cheap that we use she has me buy it the first day of the sale while it is usually in stock. I do all the shopping now on the way home from work to save on gas. It was six fifty nine a gallon when I filled today.

  I cleaned the chimney for the wood stove and brought some wood up and stacked on the porch. Looks like we will burn some wood this winter. I have been driving the pickup one day a week to work and picking up discarded wood pallets and a
ny other wood I can scrounge up to burn this winter to stretch our firewood supply. I have brought home and cut up many pieces of discarded wood furniture to burn also.

  Many say you have to be very careful burning some of this kind of wood because it emits toxic fumes but I’ll burn it mixed with regular wood and this old wood stove always draws a lot of air from the room to send up the chimney so I don’t see how the fumes can enter the room anyway.

  One of our neighbors makes extra cash by selling firewood and I stopped to see him. We came to an agreement and he delivered five cords of wood this week. I had cleaned out a lean-to and we stacked the wood in there. That should be enough wood with what I have already to last a couple seasons almost.

  I bought two deer tags this year and again it was very easy to shoot the two deer. This year I took them in to be registered to keep it legal. One was a large buck and the other was the biggest doe in the bunch that I saw together. It turned out to be quite a bit of meat and mostly filled our small freezer with some of the other stuff we had bought on sale in there too. Again I had the grocery store grind some of the venison into hamburger for me.

  The electric company has not raised their rates and we are using a couple of electric heaters in the house. We only have to heat the room we are in that way. I only burned the wood stove a couple times so far, mainly just to check to see for sure that it still works fine. We have the gas furnace turned way down low and I kick it in on the mornings to warm the whole house (except the blocked off rooms) then we use an electric heater in the room we are in.

  I think we will start using the wood stove a little now and try not to use the propane at all. Flo is now baking our own bread like we did years ago. It is cheaper and better bread plus the oven warms the house. I called the propane company today just to see how much propane was and they said six eighty a gallon with a two hundred gallon maximum order. They also said they expected it to go up with every order they receive. I am so glad I bought what I did at just over four dollars a gallon.