Kristin's Lantern Submission

I recently submitted a submission (of all things to submit) to apply as an opinion columnist for The Lantern. The prompt: "What will happen to the United States during George W. Bush's second term as president?" In case you're interested in my 511-word entry, here it is:

Some people are thrilled with the idea of four more years of George W. Bush. We could defeat terrorism and, while we’re at it, nuke the whales! Others are shaking in a corner, fearing the worst. We could get blown up by all the other countries that hate us! The reality lies somewhere in between. We won’t ever completely defeat terrorism, but we’ll probably give it enough of a beat-down to avoid getting ourselves blown up. The real question is what life will be like in America over the next four years.

The second Bush term will bring lots and lots of babies as a result of abstinence-only education. I don’t know who came up with the delusion that telling kids not to have sex will actually keep kids from having sex. Look at the D.A.R.E. program. My school system gave us two years’ worth of don’t-do-drugs education, but students at my high school still drank and smoked pot. Regardless of their education, some high school students will still do what some high school students have always done: have sex.

So it’s decided then. The next four years will bring a huge increase in unplanned babies. Okay. But what else will happen?

Tax breaks for people who purchase SUVs will rise, thereby eliminating the demand for any other kind of vehicle. SUVs will evolve into “bigger and better” machines, because everyone knows that the size of a person’s SUV is proportional to the size of his penis. Parking spaces will need to be larger to allow for these bigger vehicles, so in turn, parking lots will increase in size.

Bigger parking lots means more suburban sprawl. Of course, we’ll need to make room for this, so a good portion of our farmland will be converted into parking lots. There will be no more room to raise cattle, so Americans will all be forced into a vegetarian diet.

Men ages 18 through 25 won’t have to be vegetarians, though, because they’ll all be overseas as a result of the draft. There, they can eat all the beef they want courtesy of local farmers. Unfortunately, our soldiers will all be killed due to an unnecessary war, but that’s a small price to pay for the luxury of steak.

By the end of Bush’s second term, the earliest of the abstinence-only babies will be old enough to play in soccer leagues. Of course, all of these babies’ fathers will have been lost at war, so their single mothers will have to drive them around in tax-break purchased SUVs. Combine that with huge parking lots and no more cattle, and you reach a picture of life under a second Bush term: A whole country full of plant-eating, suburban-living, SUV-driving soccer moms.

Of course, none of this matters to me. I can’t get drafted, I already know what condoms are, and I’m already a vegetarian. I grew up in the suburbs, so SUV-driving soccer moms and large parking lots aren’t that scary to me. Really, my life won’t change that much in the next four years.