Jack of Harts

When the supermarkets ran out of food during the Second Great Depression, it started a migration as the city folk marched out and tried to get their food from the local yokels. Maybe it was more a stumble in many cases. A shuffling. Kinda like zombies. Well, they learned that game hunters are perfectly okay with hunting long pig if said pigs are trying to take their land and food. I’m not going to say it was one sided. Many parts of America survived the depression with few or no problems at all. Others collapsed under the weight of their problems. Some groups of farmers, hunters, and retired veterans shot looters until the cows came home and had awesome barbeques. Some got snowed under by the weight of desperate cities looking for any way to feed their people. Some States came out of the depression golden and having fun. Others completely shattered. Though I will note that in even the worst of the States, some Sanctuaries of normality survived. Many never lost broadband internet or full network television and got to see the chaos on all their screens as they shook their heads and happily drove into work each day without a care in the world.

Many of the States had issues with their biggest cities passing onerous laws and forcing the rest of their States to live by them. What could they do? Leave? The New States Clause of the American Constitution made it illegal to do that unless the State agreed. So the outer counties were captives to capital cities that had no interesting in letting them leave, and could force them to follow big city laws. Or so they thought. What the people of Jack’s time call Old California is still famous for having been home to a Sanctuary Movement where individual cities or counties simply refused to follow particular Federal or State laws. The first were created due to political disagreements on how to deal with illegal aliens or civilian ownership of firearms, but many other Sanctuaries sprouted up over the decades until you could find Sanctuary from just about any law or regulation you didn’t like. That made policing in America rather complicated in the decades leading up to the Second Great Depression.

Those of you who know me, know that I keep track of politics and am not shy about saying what I think. But I write stories that I want everybody to enjoy reading, so I don’t use political party names related to those of our current day. That is on purpose. The old political parties effectively died during the Second Great Depression, and those of Jack’s childhood are all new or radically transformed from those we know. I will note that the United States of America had over a dozen major political parties, and at least that many minor parties. Most of them came from individual States or State coalitions, though many were loosely affiliated into national power blocs. There were conservatives, liberals, and moderates, as well as socialists and capitalist parties. There were environmentalist parties and low tax parties. I haven’t named most of them, and I probably never will. And besides, most of even those political parties disappeared or radically changed once more on the day the Shang bombarded Washington DC and brought Yosemite Station down over most of the western United States. That changed politics in Jack’s day just a little bit.