A Fearful Vision of the Future

Mixing Unsolicited Punditry and Gaming

I recently was trying to run a superheroes game set in the near future. I set it in the year 2015, and had no idea how potentially accurate it may actually turn out to be with the current moves of the government. In this world, I put into play the following aspects:

1. National Unemployment at approximately 25%.
2. The Executive Branch completely snowed under by the Legislative branch.
3. No more international lenders, so the country was bankrupt and consuming itself by selling off it’s assets to the richest people in the world to line the pockets of corrupt senators
4. Nationalization of most industry and their subsequent closure except for massive WPA style work projects
5. Shantytowns named Obamavilles
6. Huge tracts of McMansion housing developments turned into slums and low rent apartment housing.
7. The collapse of the dollar to 10% of its current value.

I did this kind of as a “worst case scenario” of what the news could become. Little did I know that we are fast on track to actually having this happen! The more I look at the future, the more I think this country is entering it’s first collapse like Rome did. Many of the fundamentals still there, but irreversibly changed. Maybe it’s our second such change, after the civil war of course, but still. I worry for the future of this being our second Anti-Bellum period.

A strange and dangerous world we are living in when your nightmares are threatening to become real.