When combined with high unemployment among the young, (the young being anyone less than 80-years-old by 2044), a legislature and legal system dominated by the Boomers tended to result in terribly strange outcomes for the culture.
Boomers could out-vote everyone and usually handpicked all the elected officials. Once the Boomers no longer had to worry about children, because they didn't have any or had finished with all that, they decided that paying for schools didn't make sense anymore since there was no longer a need. Consequently, by 2044, the teaching profession had disappeared and was replaced with large warehouses of screaming children and under-maintained, out-of-date education-computers.
All of this happened organically, with no one making any collective decisions; it's just how the culture morphed over time.
One of the problems was that, even though the Boomers were not prepared to give up any of the privileges and benefits associated with being the largest and richest demographic segment in history, they had expected to be dead before the planet went sour. But, of course, the little red miracle pill changed all that.
To be fair, Boomers had been really great at one thing: consumption. Boomers had fed the longest lived upwardly mobile economy in human history, but they really hadn't done much more than improve what had been given to them by their elders -- except for one truly original thing: Woodstock.
Boomers instinctively needed to spawn every twenty years or so and Woodstock 4 was renamed "Gathering A Generation" by the promoters who didn't want to be associated with the new meaning of the word "Woodstock" as it was coined by younger people.
In 2044, the G.A.G. festival was held in a large farmer's field in Texas in January, because any state south of the Mason/Dixon was empty in the summer as all the southerners flew North for some relief from the heat. Many had hoped it could be held in New York state again, but that was impossible because weather in the NorthEast was completely unpredictable and summers were made up of intermittent tropical heat waves and monsoons.
There are many things that a farmer's field is made of. There is sand, clay and organic material and, even though it's gross and even dangerous to play with the organic material that you can find in a farmer's field, it's not half as bad as what was hidden in the GAG Festival’s farmer's field: trichloroethylene.The only farmer in all of Texas willing to have his farm trampled by a million baby boomers and their friends was a farmer who was also "willing" to allow a "family run" California waste hauling company to plow in hundreds of thousands of pounds of excess hazardous waste onto his land. The hauling company's client needed to get rid of the trichloroethylene for a local manufacturing client that had used up its pollution credits at all the West Coast SuperFund sites.
Shipping the material from California to Texas or some alternative SuperFund location designated for burying of this material was not the issue; the company was simply out of SuperFund "super-saver points" and being allowed to bury the stuff legally would have cost a fortune and involved a mountain of paperwork.
But -- thanks to the powers of persuasion of the waste hauling company and the clear-headed thinking of a farmer who wanted to live (and let live) and didn't mind the cash either -- this particular set of fields was covered with some extremely nasty additional chemistry that one would not normally expect to find there.
In all fairness, it was now unlikely that anything would grow in this field, at least it was unlikely that anything would ever grow normally in this field and so human health was not under threat, since people don't eat potatoes with eyes that blink (at least not yet).
The problem started when the promoters, when presenting the idea of the GAG festival to the farmer, neglected to mention the numbers of people who would be staying in the fields but instead focussed on the hotel and casino development. They did not reveal the thing about the million people until after the farmer had become quite excited about the rather large sum of money (by farmer standards) that would accrue to him if he sold the property -- property, mind you, that he really didn't want anymore. By the time he learned about the million or so ground level attendees, he was way too hooked to get terribly incensed about a few extra visitors since all they were going to do was tromp about on the ground for a few days -- what could go wrong? Nevertheless, due to his religious convictions, he told the promoters about the hazardous waste in the field. He knew he'd be sorry but he wasn't a bad man and he didn't want it on his conscience. The promoters cut the price they were offering in half but they bought the farm anyway and he cursed his honesty from that day forward.The promoters did what they thought they should do under the circumstances -- they had the entire field covered in beach sand. And then they prayed it wouldn't rain -- well they didn't pray but they really really hoped.
However, because many of the Boomers had retired and could now, once again, rejoin the counter-culture after being the culture for most of their lives, the media projected that the GAG weekend would be a geriatric mud-fest second to none. Most of the anticipatory Webivision programs leading up to the festival showed that, since the attendees had money coming out of every orifice, the preparations had been exhaustive.
The promoters promised no traffic jam this time -- a 10-story parking structure had been constructed beside the site along with a new shopping mall and full service hotel (each room having its own mud-bath). The bands were to perform from the top of the parking structure so that every one of the million or so $500 a puddle attendees could see and hear all the great music from massive speakers large enough to penetrate the nearly deaf crowd.
Of course, the musical group that everyone wanted to see the most was the remaining members of the band "What?!" who had sung the now legendary lyric "I hope I die before I hit 50." This turned out to be patently ironic because the members of the band "What?!" had long ago crashed through 50 and were more likely to hit its multiple than remember its passing.
Edgley was not that keen on going to the GAG Festival but his wife insisted that they celebrate their newfound wealth with a little R&R and besides, it wasn't as if he didn't have a SPECTACL with which his company could contact him if, by some incredible freak accident, the Waste-REL should come bouncing back from oblivion. Mrs. Edgley had purchased the tickets more than a year before and she would have divorced Edgley and taken half of his now paltry, stinking $175 million dollars if he hadn't decided to chauffeur her to the thing.
That was what made Edgley so cranky. Even though the shuttle had blown up and the Waste-REL had disappeared into nothingness, the damn stock was continuing to trade at multiples that made him want to have a full out 2-year-old tantrum, with kicking and screaming and breath holding and everything. But he couldn't, after all, he was a CEO and CEO's don't writhe on the floor screaming and crying unless it's CEO apology week in Japan.
Of course, there was a traffic jam. Boomers made traffic jams wherever they went. In fact, some have wondered why the visitor from the Sagittarian Galaxy didn't just wait for the Woodstock 4 traffic jam and zap the contents of the roadways. It would have made fascinating "eye-in-the-sky footage" for the 11 o'clock news. As it is, Edgley and a large proportion of the world's richest old folks were waiting impatiently for the chance to watch their favorite rock bands and then rattle their jewelry.
Mrs. Edgley watched the stock market reports on the car-link as the Edgley's V-12 Jagular sat blowing carbon monoxide all over the I-45. Edgley didn't care to watch the stream because it was not a normal business program.
By 2044, Zodiac signs had been mostly replaced by brands -- each person was born under a brand - for instance if you, like Mrs. Edgley, were born between January 3rd to the 13th, your mood and personality would be affected by the performance of Awakola or AWAKY.2 as it was known on the New York Stock Exchange. January 13th was when the Awakola annual report normally came out and those born under the Awakola brand would always read it to see if they were going to have a good year. Edgley was just glad that his wife wasn't numbered among the people who were the most rabid watchers of their brand-sign: folks born under entertainment industry brands. These people would get up in the middle of the night to follow overseas box-office receipt tallies from movies and vids in which they had no personal investment because they wanted to know if they would fall in love next week. People born under the Vereversal Brand (September 7th to the 14th) so associated themselves with the company that when the tabloids announced that Brock Harstring, Vereversal's biggest star, had come down with cancer, a large proportion of the world's population reported to their local hospitals for chemotherapy.
A similarly large proportion of the Earth's population were very, very slowly inching the last few miles to Yasgar's Hotel and Casino in New Woodstock, Texas. Billions of miles away, in outer space, on the other side of the galaxy, six astronauts and the world's smartest computer were about to head back, in the same general direction.
Next: The Label
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