Amsterdam 2012 (23 page)

Charity was the third pillar of Islam.
 
And along with charity came political power.

#

Around midnight one night I was asked by one of the nurses to start a morphine drip for a new patient in the room furthest from the nurses station, down by the stairwell.
 
I rolled the drip apparatus down the hall and entered a room with a single patient in a two-bed room, a young Hispanic man about twenty years old.
 
He was crying silently.
 
I asked him if he was in pain.
 
He didn’t answer.
 
I picked up his right arm to look for a vein for the intravenous drip.
 
Where there should have been a hand was a white gauze-bound stump.

“What happened to your hand?” I blurted before I could stop myself.
 

“They cut it off,” he said.

“Who cut it off?”

“I carjacked a Lexus and they chopped off my hand.”

“Who did?”

“The fucking Muslim freaks, that’s the fuck who.
 
Who the fuck do you think would do such a fuck-ass thing.
 
I’m a fucking cripple.
 
They tell me to get a job?
 
How am I
s’posed
to do anything without a fucking hand?”

I had heard rumors—on talk radio—of “chop-chop square,” a parking lot in downtown Dearborn where
mutawas
meted out punishment every Friday—fornicators flogged forty lashes, thieves losing their hands, adulterers stoned.
 
I had assumed the stories were the propaganda of Mullet supporters who wanted Muslims to be herded off into internment camps.
 
But here it was happening in Los Angeles while our mayor applauded the drop in drug crime.
 

This boy wore a
pachuco
cross tattoo on his cheek, and across his forehead an elaborate Old English letter S, signs of his membership in some gang.
 
It would’ve been easy to say he deserved what he got, but I felt sick to my stomach.
 
I hooked up the IV, working quickly, then rushed to the bathroom and vomited.

Later the nurses gossiping about the boy said gang members were disappearing in Culver City and South Central.
 
No one knew if they were fleeing to other cities or if they were being killed.
 
Rumor had it if you ventured near an “Islamic Community” with a gang tattoo, you got taken someplace.
 
Social service organizations that removed tattoos for free were flooded with young men wanting to get rid of their gang markings.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not investigate these rumors.

#

The first blizzards hit the Midwest three weeks after the inauguration.
 
Hundreds of flights were cancelled in the plains, highways hobbled, visibility near zero.
 
Power was cut to millions in Illinois and Missouri.
 
Many places reported twelve to eighteen inches of snow with winds gusting to over thirty miles per hour.
 
Hundreds of schools, universities and state offices were closed from Michigan to Texas.
 
The Kansas governor declared a disaster emergency for twenty-seven counties.
 
High winds hit Dayton, Ohio, knocking down power lines and tearing up shingles.
 
Wisconsin reported blizzards.
 
Cars were spinning out of control on the sleet covered roads of Lubbock, Texas.

Many counties, strapped by the high price of oil, ran out of money for gasoline for snow ploughs.
 
After the storm, temperatures dipped into the low teens for two weeks.
 
Electricity was out in many places for a week or more.
 
Millions were without power.
 
Many people were running out of heating fuel as well, and trucks were having a hard time getting through unplowed streets to deliver it.
 
Several dozen people died of carbon monoxide poisoning from using portable generators or charcoal grills in their houses.
 
Eighty-four people froze to death in one day in Illinois alone.

President Mullet immediately directed a release of 30 million barrels of the 700 million barrels of oil held in reserve by the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
then
increased it to 60 million barrels the following day.
 
He released federal funding for heating fuel for the poor, but the biggest problem was getting the fuel to the people who needed it.
 
Because hundreds of miles of road remained unplowed, stores were running out of food.

Governors from several states declared state of emergencies, and President Mullet released funds to FEMA.
 
The National Guard was sent in to plow roads and evacuate people in isolated areas without electricity.
 

We had it easy in Los Angeles.
 
No one would die of hypothermia here.
 
My mother organized the neighborhood women to pack boxes of canned goods and warm clothing, which were picked up by the Red Cross.
 
In the afternoons before work, I took blood from volunteers at the hospital.

Rumors that terrorists had taken out the power grid were quickly debunked in the media, but it didn’t keep people from wondering how the infrastructure of such a vast area could collapse so easily.
 
Ten days after the storm, many places still didn’t have power.
 
The death toll was in the hundreds.
 
The rumors persisted.
 
Then a
New York Times
article revealed that two suspected terrorists had been apprehended crossing into New York from Canada with bomb-making materials just north of a major electrical switching station that was responsible for the electrical failure across the northern Midwest.
 
The terrorist arrests had not been reported for a week.
 
That set off more rumors and an epidemic of distrust, both of government officials and the press.
 
“What else aren’t they telling us?” cried the television commentators.
 
If a snowstorm could cripple the country like this, what would happen if there really was a terrorist attack?
 

People began to realize how vulnerable the country was.
 

So when President Mullet held a press conference to reassure the nation it was doing everything in its power to restore electricity, clear roads, and provide emergency heating oil, and terrorism had nothing to do the power failures, the nation did not believe him.

It did not go unnoticed that Dearborn, Toledo, Detroit, and other cities with “Islamic Communities” fared well during the crisis.
 
Local mosques provided food and shelter, and extended their charity into non-Muslim neighborhoods.
 
Their organizational ability and ready supplies of money, heating oil, and food did not go unappreciated, and as adjacent neighborhoods began to lose themselves to panic and looting, many discovered new respect for these self-policed communities.
 

At the height of the crisis, several weeks after the blizzard, the international news,
which had been largely ignored by the press since the beginning of the first snow fall, blazoned headlines: “UNI Members of OPEC Announce No Longer Selling Petroleum to U.S. and Europe.
”

The announcement caused oil futures to jump to $240 per barrel, which made it about ten dollars a gallon for gas at the pump.
 
The New York Stock Exchange tumbled.

Across the country communities still digging out from the snow storms closed schools and government offices to save on heating oil.
 
Factories cut production and
laid
off workers.

President Mullet, calling on the nation “to pull together to beat this crisis,” recommended to Congress a bill to ration gas.
 
Licenses with odd numbers in last digit were allowed to purchase on odd-numbered days, even numbered licenses on even-numbered days.
 
Following California’s lead, Mullet proposed a nationwide speed limit of 50 mph, as well as year-round implementation of Daylight Saving Time.
 
He advised Americans to conserve energy, and to turn down thermostats and make sure lights were out.
 
Mullet recommended stores shorten hours, and cities cut down on streetlights.
 
Penalties were assessed to individual households that didn’t cut energy by fifteen percent.
 
This call for conservation was ridiculed by the thousands of households still without electricity.

Mullet did his best to reassure the country.
 
“We are far less reliant on oil than during the oil crisis in 1973,” he began one Sunday broadcast.
 
“We have seen tremendous growth in sectors of economy with little oil dependence such as financing, banking, retail, and technology, and a decline in energy intense industries such as heavy industry and manufacturing.
 
We have increased imports from Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Angola, and the former Soviet Union.
 
With our strides in ethanol production, coal, and natural gas, and development of Canadian tar sands, we have decreased our importation of oil from two-thirds in 2008 to one-third today.
 

“I will work with Congress to make sure the United States will not see the double-digit interest rates, nine percent inflation and high unemployment we saw in the seventies.
 
If we tighten our belts and work together, we will beat this oil crisis.”

His speeches did little to shorten the lines at the gas stations.

Chapter Ten

I liked seeing the neighborhood filled with bicycles.
 
It made Los Angeles seem like a friendly place.
 
Well, friendlier anyhow.

The tax season ended and work fell off for my father.
 
He spent more and more time at home.
 
He attached an aluminum cart to the back of his bicycle and delivered Mother’s vegetables around the neighborhood.
 
Only after he mentioned he had
laid
off two accountants did I realize he had never taken so much time off before.
 
With people paying fewer taxes and businesses cutting back and closing down, his profession was hurting too.

Gasoline was close to twelve dollars a gallon.
 
People were still getting around—those who had hybrid cars.
 
Others biked or took the electric buses.
 
But the real impact of high gas prices was delivery transportation, which was slow to convert to hybrid technology—trucks and airplanes.
 
Anything that had to be shipped was now two or three times more expensive.
 
Food and all consumer items.
 
A gallon of milk was $6.45.
 
A pound of hamburger $7.35.
 
The cost of mail delivery doubled, and residential mail was delivered only three days a week.
 
Federal Express
laid
off half of its workers, more than 70,000.
 
Airports were losing so much revenue many were only partially operational; others were in danger of closing.
 
After years of supporting the economy through consumer spending, Americans stopped buying.
 
As they lost their jobs, millions could not meet the minimum payments on their large consumer debt.
 
Foreclosures and bankruptcies were skyrocketing.
 
A number of banks collapsed.
 
The stock market was off thirty-five percent from its high in 2011.
 
America was sinking quickly into the stagflation of 1973.
 

My parents grumbled like everyone else, yet in a weird way they seemed happier.
 
Mother now knew all our neighbors by name and was always doing something for someone.
 
Dad seemed less stressed.
 
I saw them together more, holding hands and laughing.
 
It was as if they were relieved to have their lives made simpler, as if the challenge of survival made them closer.
 
Perhaps they began to see what really mattered to them—those things they cared about losing, and those they didn’t.
 
Perhaps I romanticized it.

I recalled a study I read in my psychology class at Canterbury, which showed people who make choices and are told they are permanent are happier than people who are told they can change their minds.
 
This idea that some kind of curb on freewill could make us happier made me itch madly all over.
 
It violated all of my instincts.
 
It made me fear the changes I saw around me.
 
If these changes brought greater contentment, would people accept life with fewer choices?
 
Would they give up some of their freedoms, happy to be rid of the responsibility?