Solidly set and running smoothly with an economic and intellectual infrastructure that included millions of American citizens, talents ready, workers inside of the government institutions, an ant hill existed below the fruited plains that arose to save the most powerful country in the world.
All this without a single bureaucrat lifting a finger, without a solitary politician casting a vote.
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Chapter 10-Clarion Call-The Clarion Sounds; The Common Sense Is Implemented
The third day of the national blackout was at dusk and the citizenry across the fruited plains were about to bust out. Maybe you had to be there, as they like to say. Perhaps someday a child born long after the national blackout, perhaps conceived during the national blackout, will read the words of this humble Blogger and consider my true story of the time. In the day of the founding fathers, there were no Bloggers. While any citizen could sit down with a handy quill pen and write anything he or she wanted, there was no Internet, no way for the words and wisdom and stories to reach across the fruited plains.
Well there were a lot of things different at the time of the founding fathers as compared to current times. We discovered that as a nation during the national blackout and we fixed a lot of the problems to coincide with the technology of our time.
I recall myself being antsy and restless as I administered Will his medicines and told him not to get riled enough to raise his blood pressure. “Come on, Pat. We can’t just keep sitting around twiddling our thumbs in the dark, waiting for somebody to save us. We’ve got to get the power back on. You’d think with all the intelligence and technology in this country we could get a damn power plant up and running.”
I’m not making this up, for at this point in Will’s exasperated rant we heard, loud and clear and appearing to come from heaven itself, the sound of a ….it was the sound of a horn!
At first I cocked my head, much like a dog, to tilt ear toward the sound, to move brain around a bit to dislodge the cobwebs. Because I knew that sound!
It was the sound of the horn of the Clarion Call web site.
Of course I had to be losing my mind.
Just in case I opened the door a nudge and put my ear outside the door frame. To my surprise all of the neighborhood was out on porches, on decks, all tilting ears and clearing cob webs from tired worried brains.
“I think that’s the sound of the horn on Clarion Call,” I shouted to my neighbor then felt a bit silly. Sarah Winslow was in her 80’s and probably never heard of Clarion Call.
“It sure is,” Sarah called back, “I thought I’d never hear that sound again.”
And so it began, the Clarion Call blaring out across the fruited plains, oftentimes muffled by the efforts of trying to shut Mickey Majors the hell up.
For the sound of the Clarion Call horn was coming to us from the same nationwide emergency broadcasting system that so dreadfully brought us three miserable days of a nasty man’s nasty promises.
Media tents along the highways and byways began to fill as the Clarion Call horn sounded in Idaho, across the Hoover Dam, above the silent and drab electric-less Las Vegas strip, down the Shenandoah River, up the Mississippi, through New Orleans, across the deserts of Texas.
CB radios, ran by batteries and by then with some sort of Pony Express method of transmission, powered up and began messaging across the fruited plains. All parts of the country reported in via whatever Rube Goldberg method rigged up to pass news and the country gasped by the realization that somebody, somewhere, got control of that crazy national EBS and finally there would be sanity restored.
Clarion Call was, as I described earlier, a very popular web site. I don’t know how many people of the then estimated 285 million people living in the United States had heard of it. It was considered on a par with Amazon and Google so that famous horn sound that greets visitors to its web site on the home page was fairly well known.
It was the next words blaring across the EBS that caused my jaw to hit the ground in surprise.
“This is Clarion Call,” I heard quite plainly as I stood outside on my very front porch and heard something very different than that endless Mickey Majors’ rant. “We have a request for a fake funeral and are looking for volunteers willing to help a Clarion Call client attend her own funeral. Sign onto our site for details on locale and talents needed.”
I was stopped still. Will looked at me, his eyebrows almost to his scalp. It was but a week prior that I’d been part of the fake funeral of Betty Miller. The job was for, as my mind whirled and jaw remained on ground, Clarion Call.
What the he….?
The sound of laughter could then be heard from the EBS, and then the sound of serious.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States of America, I am General Martin Williams. I am currently in charge of protecting the United States so first thing the folks at Clarion Call wanted to do once they got this system up and running was to have me come on the EBS and assure you all that the coastline and air space of this country are protected. I’ll leave it at that for now and let the good people at Clarion Call handle the communication from here on in.”
My jaw remained on the ground as the realization dawned on me that here I was, standing on my front porch, listening to some General in the military assure me that we are safe. The mind does strange things when the world turns upside down but after some whirling I realized that somehow somebody got that EBS thing to work and also somehow, Clarion Call was now in charge.
“That request for a fake funeral was a joke, folks,” the voice on the EBS then said what I hoped was the case. At that point I had to smile.
It wasn’t the President, or any elected member of the political class for that matter, but it sounded like the voice of a nice American that took the time to a)get the EBS working and b)first thing, find a way to calm a restless country after three days of no electricity by assuring our collective safety.
I felt better from that moment than I ever did at the utterance of any President from Eisenhower through to Obama.
It got better after that.
It was all about The Common Sense and I capitalize those words intentionally.
Which is not to be confused with the more…eh, “common” term: “common sense”.
The forefathers of our forefathers called it common law, at least those who came here from England. Common law, common sense….it’s defined in so many ways, with so many examples.
As the country went forward with putting the country back together, we began by agreeing that the new system would be based on common sense and just to make sure of that, we called our new national voting system “The Common Sense”.
It’s not about religion though it certainly fits into all known organized religions on the planet. It’s not about science, at least science alone. It’s not about any one academic endeavor or school subject. We all agreed, loosely, that common sense was that which guides us when the manuals and instructions don’t quite fill the task.
We know, for example, that to climb a staircase we need to lift one foot to the next step then heft up the other foot, and so on and so forth. We don’t really need a manual to tell us how to climb the steps; we know how to do so from our experience with life.
Indeed we live and with life we seek food, water, safety….typical Maslow’s hierarchy of needs stuff, then we move on to fun, joy and happiness. We instinctively protect the young that the next generation carry forth the genes to keep the human race alive. We fight to remain alive as long as we can as that is part of our instinct and part of our common sense.
We don’t need to write it down or make it all a law. We get it.
The Ruling Class, however, spends its life, indeed EXISTS just to destroy our common sense. For it is our common sense that will quell their power and can’t have that. That stupid Zimmerman/Trayvon case is an example of a government over-reach to try to frighten us into not even defending ourselves. Loosely put, the government, via President Obama who sighed that the thug Trayvon Martin looked just like his phantom son. George Zimmerman should have allowed Trayvon to methodically pound his head onto the concrete rather than pull out his lawful weapon and stop the attack. At least that was the logic of the Ruling Class as us ordinary Plebes interpreted it.
The Muslim political correctness mania also was an attempt by the Ruling Class to stop our common sense. Goodness knows that 100% of all terror attacks were committed by radical Muslims, damn we should not be “profiling” them alone on the airplanes because it makes us look mean, trying to protect ourselves and everything. Thus we put hands up the drawers of wheel-chaired Grannies and torment young children with strange wands while our common sense screamed that WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY!
We don’t drill oil on our own public lands because some political party or another gets big campaign donations from the oil-producing sheikdoms of the world so throw common sense out the window as it’s not what benefits the common people but what benefits the Ruling Class.
Of course I quickly give a synopsis of US versus THEM as concerns the Ruling Class versus the Country Class. We knew all this was going on before the blackout, of course, but I say that softly.
I didn’t know what “fracking” was as I lived a busy life. I only vaguely knew that Obama wouldn’t sign off on the Pennsylvania pipeline to bring oil easily down from Canada, although common sense would dictate that using Canadian oil was more effective in terms of price and availability than shipping oil across the planet from some horror in the desert where their Ruling Class of Sheiks and Emperors enslave the people via a bullying religion.
The Ruling Class fights common sense every step of the way for they obtain their power only by keeping us from following our own God-given common sense. Or nature-given, for the Atheists among us.
It wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day of the blackout that The Common Sense was implemented and it’s still with us today.
Things buzzed mightily across the fruited plains after the horn of Clarion Call sounded across the country’s Emergency Broadcasting System. Will and I took an evening walk down to the local media tent and we were astounded, but pleasantly.
People were gathered all around the media tent and more kept streaming up and down the most major highway of our region. All around small groups of people gathered as the sounds of laughter, joy and tinkling glass could be heard. As I learned before finally turning in that fateful night, it was the same situation across the fruited plains.
The guy speaking on the EBS was NOT an employee of Clarion Call, we were to learn. He was recruited by employees of Clarion Call, much the way they recruit people to …well to do fake funerals for example.
Seems about a dozen employees were present at the main office of Clarion Call when the power went down. Clarion Call, as is no surprise, had a mega-cool electric backup system so while Americans across the fruited plains coped with the dark and cold, the employees at Clarion Call went into their database and looked up some information, recruited some help to deal with this situation.
Clarion Call employees managed to contact the military. They found a public speaker to handle that important task. They found an expert in this crazy EBS and while it took a couple of days, they did manage to get Mickey Majors off of that thing and use the EBS for what it was meant for.
It’s not that they were heroes, these Clarion Call employees. They’d all be the first to deny any heroism. It was more that they had a chance to do what they do so they got busy doing it. The CC database was filled with millions of Americans with thousands of talents and the CC employees got to it.
Over the next day the country would be treated to the debates of such pundit luminaries as Glen Beck, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh but no, it wasn’t just conservative voices filling America’s air across the fruited plains. Also we had the glory of hearing Chris Matthews and every host of the nation’s PBS…which no longer exists, by the way.
For many hours we heard voices and debates of more ordinary citizens and, indeed, we honed in on one who became the country’s new leader. Since yon reader knows all about this by now, let us tell the story of the implementation of The Common Sense.
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