By 2013 people began to take the Great Transformation for granted. The violence that had characterized the years 2007 to 2011 had subsided, and the severity of most of the problems that had plagued the changeover was lessening. These were mainly energy supply and food distribution problems, which finally seemed soluble as people began to get used to the new ways of doing things.
Gasoline was $9.47 a gallon, but the real problem was its general lack of availability. However, that didn't matter much any more, since the standard private vehicle was either a golf cart, or some kind of jury-rigged, neighborhood-engineered hybrid that ran on kerosene and electricity, or propane and electricity, or whatever.
The bulk of the electricity, which had mostly replaced the petroleum that had run the dinosaur society (as it was now called), was generated by the nuclear power plants that had popped up in every town and village of over 50 thousand people, all over the country. Their output was supplemented by the Nebraska Wind Farm, which covered the entire state, and by 2012 there was actually an electrical surplus.
Of course, the energy companies were a government enterprise by 2011. President Boxer and Congress had negotiated a final settlement with the former oil companies, which had reluctantly conceded that energy, being a national security issue, was too important to reside in private hands motivated by the prospect of personal gain. Secretary of the Interior Eastwood stepped in to help hammer out the specific terms, thus averting violence. Their surrender was inevitable anyway, after the U.S.'s humiliating loss of a third middle eastern war in 2007, this one to tiny Syria. Imports of middle eastern oil were over forever, and the plutocracy was broken.
Food distribution remained a serious difficulty, but solutions were gradually being cobbled together. Electric railroad trains had mostly replaced the fleets of diesel-burning semi-tractors that had delivered to the supermegamarkets in the old days, and even the steam locomotive had made something of a comeback. Agriculture was much more local and community-based by the last year of the first decade. Stores were smaller and more numerous, supplied by a multitude of big, muscular golf carts pulling trailers. Forty percent of the population was now engaged directly in agriculture, as opposed to less than three percent in the bad old days. People once again had enough to eat most of the time in the new decentralized, vigorously free-enterprise oriented economy, and the starvation crises of 2007-08 were safely behind us.
By the time President Kucinich took office early in 2013, Congress had extended its ban on the game of golf, widely reviled as the frivolous and wasteful leisure activity of the discredited plutocratic elite, which was one reason so many golf carts were available. In any case the golf courses had all been converted to goat, sheep, and cattle ranches, with auxiliary duck ponds and chicken runs. Feedlots and broilerhouses were no more, and the pesticide-laden poisonous vegetables of the past had been replaced almost exclusively by organically-grown produce. The use of organically-derived nicotine as an approved pesticide gave a boost to the previously moribund tobacco growing regions.
Former plutocrats still met to play golf at secret locations. They spent idle afternoons idiotically chasing a little white ball around a pasture, while sullenly plotting their return to power, and return of "justice," by which they meant their ownership of all the country's wealth as well as of its government. But such talk might as well have been an opium dream.
All in all, the American people enjoyed a higher quality of life despite a lower standard of living.
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