It's 2020, And This Is Your Life

Well, it's May 19, 2020, and Australia is a very different country to the far more chaotic nation we knew back in 2008 when World Government President Kevin Rudd, then prime minister, drew together 1000 of the "best and brightest" minds to "shake the trees" and dream up a better tomorrow. This tomorrow, today, here in 2020.

It's Whitlam Day today and I woke up at 5am. I had no choice. Julia Gillard's voice blasted into the room, well every room, in every home, in every town, city and ecoville, to make sure none of us get up late or leave the house still sleepy. They had to turn down the standard volume after all those carbon credit earning suicides, so her voice doesn't always wake me right up.

I haven't paid my KevNet bill so the only free tele available while I'm eating my raw vegetable breakfast was old Kevin Rudd speeches on the KBC (Kevin Broadcasting Commission). I've already seen every speech he ever gave twelve or eighteen times each back in high school, when I was completing my Higher Kevin Certificate, so I read The Daily Kevin instead while I eat.

I've been saving up, so for lunch I'm going to treat myself to a $70 McDonalds Hamburger, with fries. I'll have to put up with the compulsory eduvid on why obese people are stealing our children's future but the hamburger's made from a cow that wanted to die, so it should still taste pretty good.

I'm still sleepy when I climb nine stories down the zero emission rope ladder from my apartment to the grass covered street. I would have a cigarette to wake up a bit more, while waiting for the multicycle (already loaded with ten of my neighbours) to arrive, but cigarettes were banned in 2009. Banning cigarettes was one of the most popular Ideas from the 2020 Conference amongst non-smokers. It doesn't matter of course, because cocaine, Kevoin and nano-speed is legal, and the prisons are only crowded now with lying politicians and the last of the Boltist conservatives rounded up by the first Australian republic president John Faulkner in 2014.

Anyone under 50 needs lots of nano-speed just to get all the work done. There's six million Baby Boomers to support. Most of them live as Grey Howards endlessly circling the country on Highway One. They refuse to work ("I'm 77 years old and I'm not going to farm carrots!"), and they refuse to die, even when told it is a "positive experience not to be feared", plus they keep cloning themselves.

I have a busy morning. I have to go to the Wellness Centre for my compulsory health test. It's an hour off work, but I do get paid for completing the test. Ten Carbons means for four hours I won't have to use pedal power to watch HoloTele tonight. There's a Kevin Vs Kevin debate from the 2012 election I haven't seen all sixteen hours of yet, and I'm not allowed to miss it.

I also have to find time in the afternoon to go visit my girlfriend. She's been suffering eco-anxiety (or Ecty as it's known in psychiatric circles) for a decade, but she had a total breakdown last month when state media reported that seven polar bears were found still swimming in the Russian Arctic two years after the final sliver of ice had melted up there. I thought the ice was probably going to melt anyway, eventually, and it was a bit of a miracle, maybe even of some religious significance, that the polar bears had survived for so long.

But as soon as I thought that, the alarm sounded (Julia Gillard laughing) and everyone in our building knew that I had both doubted global warming and viewed the polar bear tragedy as something other than a tragedy. I was named and shamed.

It was too much for my girlfriend. I was fined 100 Carbons and I was stripped of my citizenship. She checked into a More Than Wellness Centre. They said her recovery will be long, free and green.

It was my first major envirocrime, but that means next week I have to go to the We Owe Nature BigTime, You Bastard Centre and prove my environment-climate friendliness. If I fail I get sent to Flannery, the geothermal town in outback South Australia, where I will be re-educated for two months. Having to watch all those Flannery eduvids where he shouts how right he and Rupert Murdoch were on the dire, catastrophic changes of climate change might be harsh, but anything is better than going to prison and having to share a cell with all those lying politicians and those weirdo conservatives, with their endless quoting from the Holy Timran and their futile demands for KBC to air their bizarre and now mostly illegal ideas.

By the time I get to work, they should have unloaded the new supply of butcher's paper. We ran short last week and had to get six people on the treadmills to power a pre-Rudd era style PowerPoint presentation. We're having a What A Good Idea! meeting before lunch and we have to write our ideas on the butcher's paper and hold them over our heads to find others who agree with our ideas.

Tomorrow from here in the year 2020 I'll discuss my job, the environment, why you can now visit the beach and the Blue Mountains at the same time and how the shape of Peter Garrett's magnificent head came to inspire the design for the base-load producing solar panels that power this nation.

Sources :

2020 Summit : Death "The Positive Experience"

Jail Lying Politicians, Yes, Jail Them

'Vision For The Future', Sydney Morning Herald

Sunday Telegraph : "There Was Something Uplifting About Witnessing Such (An) Impressive Group Of Australians."

Annabel Crabb : The Great Butcher's Paper Sacrifice