299 Days: The Community

Chapter 106 The Gray Man (May 10)

Ed Oleo, a handsome man in his late fifties with a full head of grey hair, looked out his big living room window at the Pacific Ocean. He lived in West Seattle, a nice part of the city, but not one of the trendy parts. He was surrounded by good solid homes, many with nice views of the water. Ed owned a real estate company, so he always looked at neighborhoods like he was selling a house. When he looked at his neighborhood he thought: water view, established neighborhood. That described West Seattle.

A Seattle water view was still spectacular, even with all that was going on in the world. Things actually weren’t too bad in Seattle, at least not in West Seattle. Ed had known the country was living in a false economy and the house of cards would come down, eventually. It sure did, though, it wasn’t yet as bad as he expected it to be. He expected all the city people around him to go berserk with hunger and start killing each other. He thought Seattle would look like a scene from an apocalyptic movie.

Ed was wrong. At least so far. The first ten days of the “Crisis” were pretty rough. The shelves of the area Whole Foods, an overpriced organic grocery store, went bare about two days after May Day. There was only one gas station in the whole neighborhood because the city planners had determined that most cars would eventually be electric. The one gas station in West Seattle went dry one day after May Day.

But, to Ed’s amazement, his neighborhood kept calm. There was some crime, but they were minor thefts. Mostly teenagers. To get to West Seattle, one must go over a bridge. The police, what was left of them, stopped cars on the bridge which kept the obvious riff-raff out. None of his neighbors started carrying guns. None of them owned guns as far as Ed could tell. He owned a shotgun and felt like the best armed guy in a one-mile radius. Except for the criminals.

Even though violent crime wasn’t a day-to-day problem, at least in West Seattle, there were plenty of private security firms. They were everywhere. Lots of former soldiers and police were gainfully employed by these firms, most of which had “arrangements” with the police to essentially do whatever they wanted. The businessman in Ed wished he’d invested in these companies before the Collapse.

The people of West Seattle were a little too compliant for Ed’s taste, but he had to admit that it worked out well that they followed the instructions they were given on TV: remain in your houses, help is on the way, America will bounce back, yada yada yada. If the bad stuff, like the stores being empty and gas stations being closed, would have lasted more than ten days, they might not have remained so calm. Ed knew his neighbors couldn’t have done much for themselves. Almost all of them were software developers, in the financial industry, or, the biggest industry of all, government.

They were helpless. Ed shook his head and thought that if his neighbors couldn’t take their Prius to Whole Foods every day to get fresh goat cheese or whatever they ate, they would curl up into a ball and die. Turns out they didn’t die; they just complained like they were dying, but amazingly they actually made it ten days without goat cheese. Ed imagined that the withdrawals from the $7.00 lattes were pretty hard, but they lived.

After about ten days of failure after failure, the government actually started to get food and a little fuel into the city. Ed was amazed. One day, the rumor went around that a semi had arrived at Whole Foods, so people rushed out to get some food. It was true: a semi was there. But there were two disappointments.

First, people had to fill out an application for an “FCard,” which was a government electronic ration card known as a “Freedom Card.” The Freedom Corps people, wearing yellow hardhats, helped people fill out the applications and explained that the FCard could be used to get food and a limited amount of gasoline. It would draw on a person’s bank account and investments. People were euphoric: the banks had been closed, so they could finally use their money. Ed knew that the government was basically stealing their money in exchange for a little bit of food, and he came up with another word that began with “F” to better explain the FCard. But people were so thankful their government had worked hard for them and come up with a solution. Ed just shook his head. It was so obvious what was happening, but the sheeple didn’t care.

Everyone got an installment of food while their FCard application was being processed. Ed called it a “ration,” but the FCorps person at the application table corrected him. “It’s an installment, not a ‘ration,’” she said to Ed in a snappy tone.

The second disappointment was the food in the truck. It was “typical American” food or, as one of Ed’s neighbors called it, “truck stop” food. Lots of processed grains like biscuit mix, cheap pasta, mashed potato mix. There was even gravy mix—no one in yuppie West Seattle had eaten gravy mix in decades. The truck even had beef jerky. “Who eats that?” One man in line asked, “Truck and tractor pull fans?”

One lady asked the FCorps person handing out “installments” how much sodium the jerky had. Sodium? That’s a concern now? Ed shook his head again. What’s wrong with these people? They should be glad they have some food. It only cost them their entire life savings. They should be thankful, Ed chuckled to himself.

Once the shock of having to eat “truck stop” food wore off—and with grumbling stomachs it wore off very quickly—people were glad to get their “installment.” All across West Seattle, people were eating instant mashed potatoes for the first time ever. It was amazing how something like a few semis full of “truck stop” food could put everyone in a better mood. There was hope now. The semis would keep coming. They could use the FCards. The food would get slightly better and better with each truckload. Pretty soon, things would be back to normal, they kept telling themselves.

Not Ed. He knew what was going on. The government had finally taken over the last remaining parts of the economy. People were thanking the government for taking all their money in exchange for some instant mashed potatoes. Ed, the business man, could see what was happening.

It was an inflationary depression. The worst of both worlds. Usually, inflation and a depression are opposites. The inflation is a sign of an overheated economy so prices go up. A boom. A depression is the opposite, the lack of economic activity. Prices fall because no one can buy things. The government wizards who created the Collapse managed to combine the two for an inflationary depression.

The inflation came from creating too many dollars out of thin air and international reluctance to keep financing America’s absurd debt. As investors moved away from putting their money into dollars, they started buying up commodities, like food and oil. The ongoing war in the Middle East spiked the price of oil. The entire U.S. economy—all those semi trucks and everything in them—was dependent on cheap oil. When oil got really expensive, the prices for everything else skyrocketed, too.

At the same time that everything cost more, no one had any money. Who could buy anything when gasoline alone cost $10 a gallon? The economy ground to a halt. Taxes were ridiculously high, too, leaving even less money in most people’s pockets. Government regulators were in overdrive, so no rational person would invest in a business only to have a bureaucrat shut them down the next day for no particular reason. Small businesses closed temporarily or just went out of business.

Finally, it got so bad that government couldn’t ignore it anymore. Immediately before the Collapse, government started laying off public employees. It was too little too late, and it dumped millions of people into the unemployment line. They couldn’t pay their mortgages, let alone buy anything. Plus, inflation raised the prices of all the necessities, especially food, so what little money people had went to food, and maybe a little gas. Everything else was dropped.

Especially buying homes. Ed saw that homes were listed for a quarter of what they were in the real estate boom that happened years ago, and still weren’t selling. Ed’s real estate agency hadn’t sold a home in six months, and they used to sell hundreds a month.

The economy was essentially dead. America turned into a nation of bankrupt convenience store customers. All the money they had went to Doritos and gas. It was pathetic.

In the few months right before the Collapse, one of the main ways Ed was surviving was by tax evasion. Like millions of other Americans, he pretty much quit paying taxes because everyone knew the IRS couldn’t possibly put everyone in jail. The IRS only had enough agents to go after the vocal tax protestors. And they did. While most of the violent felons were released from prisons due to budget cuts, the government still had plenty of money to pay for jail space for tax protestors. It showed where their priorities were.

In the months leading up to the Collapse, the federal government was collecting less than half of what it was a year earlier, and tax rates had gone up substantially. Everyone evaded taxes, except the poor because they didn’t pay any. They even collected the Earned Income Tax credit, which was a tax “refund” even though they didn’t pay any taxes. It was a complete handout under the guise of a tax refund. Some of them cheated, too, by submitting multiple claims for their “refund.” The whole system was corrupt.

And no one cared. The rich evaded taxes, the middle class quit paying them, and the poor got their Earned Income Tax credits. No one had a stake in caring.

Ed’s savings were gone. He still had plenty of money in the bank, but the banks were closed. His investments were now pretty much worthless with the stock market basically ceasing to function.

He had planned a glorious retirement. He was a Baby Boomer and that’s all he and his friends had talked about when they hit their early sixties. Oh well. Just another thing that died when America finally collapsed.

Since his bank accounts and investments were worthless, Ed decided he’d get an FCard. Might as well get some mashed potatoes for he and his wife. He’d paid for them with his taxes and savings. Then he laughed to himself. A few years ago, he would spend hours on the computer obsessing over which fund to put his money in and the returns of this stock or that one. Now he was willing to trade it all in for some “truck stop” food.

Ed was trying to be positive. A dark sense of humor helped many people get through these times. “At least we won’t have to worry about how to pay for health care,” he said to his wife. “There isn’t any health care anymore.” He hated going to the doctor, anyway. Problem solved.

Most of the people living around Ed were smart business people. Their regular businesses had been destroyed, but they were still capitalists at heart, even if the government had slowly squeezed almost all the entrepreneurial spirit out of them. Within a week of May Day, some of his neighbors started figuring out things that people needed and how to make money by providing them. They weren’t “gouging” people, just accepting much-needed things in exchange for providing much-needed things. Little businesses started to spring up. They were all illegal, of course, but the government was powerless to stop them.

Ed knew a lot about homes. Not just the real estate sales part of them, but also how they were built. He had been either a licensed home inspector or dealt with home inspectors for almost thirty years. So, he let people know that he could look at things in their houses and maybe repair them. Ed had a network of handymen he used on his properties. He would send the work to them, for a slice of it, of course. People would take cash, but in such high amounts that almost no one had that kind of money lying around after the banks closed. Payment would be in goods—food, gas, liquor, whatever—or FCards. There were no photos on FCards; it was all the government could do just to get them up and running without fancy do-dads like verifying people’s identity, so FCards could be traded. Just like packs of cigarettes in prison.

Ed wondered if the government intentionally created FCards that could easily be traded and thereby created a new currency; one that didn’t have anything of value to back it up. Just like the old dollar. Plus, the more people with FCards, the more people were fed and not plotting to overthrow the government.

There was one other thing that got traded, but not with Ed. Attractive women seemed to have no trouble acquiring things. Not just women; Seattle had a very large gay population, so attractive men willing to do anything were also well taken care of. At first, most of the “escorts” involved in this would never have considered it. Especially all the cute yuppie soccer moms in West Seattle. Ed had assumed the soccer moms were doing it to feed their kids, but most houses had enough food, even if it was “truck stop” food. To Ed’s surprise, most of the women didn’t do it to feed their kids; they did it for luxury items. (Well, just day-to-day items taken for granted before the Collapse. But they were “luxuries” after the Collapse.) Not a majority of women did this, but a sizeable minority of them did. Some husbands and boyfriends were OK with it—morals seemed to decline even more after the Collapse—but many weren’t. Most women did it secretly. It was survival.

The churches in Seattle did not slow down the rapid morale decline after the Collapse. The churches in Seattle had always been very weak. Church attendance was essentially nonexistent there before the Collapse. After the Collapse, many people in Seattle, as elsewhere, went to church to find some answers. However, the churches in Seattle, which were almost uniformly liberal or extremely liberal, became administrative arms of the government. The Freedom Corps used churches as distribution points. The government appealed to the people’s religious sentiment (what was left of it) as a propaganda tool. “Jesus would share” and “Render unto Caesar” were the government messages aimed at church goers. The government even created the “Faith Corps” for clergy to join. A government religious agency to carry out the government’s objectives? The Founders of the nation were spinning in their graves.

During the first few weeks of the Collapse, the government was clearly the strongest organization in the country. But, as the weeks wore on, criminal gangs got stronger and stronger. In the end, the gangs were stronger because they ran the government. Just like what happened in Mexico.

Criminal gangs were often organized along ethnic lines, like the Russians or Mexicans. The criminal gangs ran protection rackets and sold guns, drugs, prostitutes, and gasoline. “Gang gas,” as their gasoline became known, was often diluted with water so it didn’t run reliably in vehicles. “Gang gas” was useful for arson, but couldn’t be counted on for running a car. The government still sold pure gasoline, called “government gas.” It was usually reliable.

One of the biggest items gangs sold was guns. Every imaginable kind of gun was for sale. Some were law enforcement and military weapons sold by corrupt cops or soldiers. Guns were illegal, of course, but that law was rarely enforced. When a gun law was enforced, it was a tool to get rid of a government opponent or rival gang member.

Something interesting about guns happened during the Collapse. Guns, which were totally illegal, became a status symbol. People with political power or gangs who were above the law would openly display them. Displaying a gun meant, “I don’t have to follow the law. You need to fear me. I can ruin you.” The liberals in West Seattle, who hated guns, seemed to love it when powerful people displayed them. It was like the liberals loved the fact that people—their people—had power. It was reassuring to the liberals that their kind had so much power. It was hypocrisy, of course: no one can have guns except us, the powerful.

It reminded Ed of the liberals before the Collapse and how they revered rich liberals, like Michael Moore, who were multimillionaires but wanted to take away all the money from the “rich.” Hypocrisy was power and the liberals loved the power.

In addition to the traditional criminal gangs, there were also white-collar gangs. They became known as the “Rotary Club gangs.” These were the people who, for example, ran health care and sold black market medical services. If someone needed to see a dentist and have some anesthesia for a root canal, they paid the gang that was protecting the dentist’s business. They paid the gang in whatever they had, like FCards, and they got dental work. Of course, with all the regulations, a law-abiding dentist must take their insurance and process that, which was impossible given the Collapse. So, when the legal way to operate became impossible, illegal ways sprang up. People needed dental work, after all.

White-collar gangs were interesting because of the people who were in them. Most were government bureaucrats like, in the example of a a “gang dentist” the health care regulators who looked the other way when the dentist was accepting FCards. They no longer had government jobs, but they had connections that were extremely valuable. While they wore white collars, everyone knew that they could rent some muscle and hurt people. It was the natural progression of government power. At first, they were regulators using soft governmental force like regulations to get what they wanted. Now they weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they were using very direct and brutal force to get what they wanted.

There was another category of gang that was neither a traditional ethnic gang nor a white-collar gang: cops. Some police, most of the ones still left in larger cities, were corrupt. They were either in a gang themselves or were paid by gangs to look the other way, arrest competitors, or use police force on whomever the paying gang wanted. Almost all of the good cops, which had been the majority, left the force during the budget cuts or because they couldn’t stand the pre-Collapse corruption. The bad ones—the really bad ones—were what was left. And they were having a field day.

Ed heard rumors about another group to beware of: paras. They were non-government paramilitary groups. Vigilantes, essentially. Since the police were either incapable or bought off, paras would go out and fight crime and corruption. All Ed knew was that once in a while a white-collar or criminal gang member would wind up dead and the cops would just smile.

All of this—the criminal gangs, white-collar gangs, corrupt cops, paras, women selling themselves, everyone breaking the law and living in black or grey market, barter instead of cash, small businesses springing up, the economy totally halting—reminded Ed’s neighbor, Dmitri, of life during the Russian collapse of the 1990s.

Dmitri was so calm about what was happening. He’d seen it before. Ed asked him what the main difference was between the Russian and American collapses.

“Guns,” Dmitri said. “You Americans have so many guns in private hands. In Russia, only the government had guns. There was no way to stop them. But Americans have guns. This is how you will stop this. If you are not too fat and lazy, as I think you might be. Pardon me. I mean no offense. But this is what I see. Good news is your guns, bad news is you have become fat and lazy. We will see which part of America wins.”

“How did you make it through the Russian collapse?” Ed asked Dmitri.

“I was the gray man,” Dmitri said.

“The what?”

“A gray man,” Dmitri said, “is one who lives in a dictatorship or corrupt society without being noticed. Instead of being a freedom fighter, the gray man just blends in, like he is gray; not black or white. He goes along with the authorities when he has to. But when the authorities are not looking, the gray man does all he can to bring them down. He cheats on his taxes, he might sabotage something small, he might even go out at night and hunt down government agents. He is an informant for the resistance, but he does it quietly, without advertising that he is a freedom fighter.”

“In the former Soviet Union,” Dmitri said, “most people were gray men and women. That is why the regime fell so quickly. Years of weakening the regime from within by the small bits of resistance from the gray men led to the fall of the authorities. And once it was clear that the authorities were losing power, millions of gray men and women sprang into action. This is why the Soviet Union fell apart so quickly. Most people were gray to some degree, and they were ready to make life as miserable as possible for the government once they had a chance.”

Dmitri thought for a moment. He was struggling with what he was about to say. “I would not have lived if I had been an open freedom fighter. I could only survive by being a gray man.” He paused again. “It is not cowardice that leads a gray man to quietly resist instead of openly fighting. It is survival. I did all I could.” He looked at Ed and said, “I did all I could.” Dmitri obviously felt guilty that he hadn’t done more.

“I’m sure you did plenty, Dmitri,” Ed said. He thought about what Dmitri said about being a gray man. It made sense. It solved the problem Ed had been struggling with, which was how to resist, but not get killed in the process. Dying didn’t accomplish much. Dying was a pretty bad survival plan.

Ed decided that he would be a gray man. But, could he pull it off? Or did the government already know about him? Before the Collapse, he had sued the corrupt state board of realtors and won. He had exposed them. Except no one had cared. With all the government had on its plate now, would they really be keeping track of people who had sued them a few years before? They were struggling to keep people fed. Ed hadn’t talked too much about his case at the time because, as glad as he was to expose them, he was still scared of them, so he kept his tussle with the government relatively quiet.

He was doing his part to undermine the government’s economy. He wasn’t paying his taxes. He laughed at himself: He considered not paying his taxes as his patriotic duty to the cause of liberty. He didn’t mind keeping the extra money, either. He was running a small illegal business and helping people fix their homes. That was something small to undermine the government. He owned a shotgun illegally. That was something. He would do more once he got the chance.

But, now the time wasn’t right for bold actions...like the shotgun. Ed knew he would end up doing more than his current tax cheating and small business. He didn’t want a lifetime of regret for not doing enough like Dmitri. Besides, he had seen these government bastards up close. They had tried to ruin him. It was payback time. Just not right that second. When the time was right.

To be the most effective gray man possible, Ed decided to fool the government into thinking he was a loyal subject. He would quit talking about how he hated them. He would even put up one of those Freedom Corps signs in his yard. All the government suck-ups had them. They were like the “National Recovery Act” signs people had in their homes and businesses during the 1930s telling everyone that they were supporting the government’s various economic controls. Yes, Ed would laugh every time he pretended to support the government while he was using that supposed support to blind them to what he was really doing.

He sat back and looked at Dmitri. Gray men like him had done a lot. Ed could do the same. There in West Seattle he couldn’t exactly hoist a Don’t Tread on Me flag. His FCard would be taken away and he’d get arrested for something, probably for having that shotgun. What would that accomplish? Dying was a pretty bad survival plan.

Instead, Ed would choose to survive. He would hollow out the government economy a tiny little bit by having a side business. He would slowly and quietly build up a network of fellow sympathizers. He wouldn’t directly ask them if they opposed the government; he’d get to know them and decide whom he could trust when the time was right. Then they would do what Dmitri did.

Ed looked at Dmitri, who was still deep in thought about what more he could have done back in the Soviet Union. Ed smiled and said, “Dmitri, I have some vodka. It’s Stolichnaya. Imported from Russia. Would you care to make a toast to the United States government and all they are doing to help us in this unfortunate time of need, and how they can count on us to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to see them succeed?”

Dmitri smiled. Ed was talking like a gray man now.