Baby

ironic for a state once known as, The Garden State.
    Now, New Jersey blossomed with one huge hideous urban ghetto after another. Just like many other states undergoing a similar renaissance. Not everyone agreed to call this progress. Like his mother.
    She remembered the stories her grandmother related to her about growing up on a working family farm with cows and hay barns and wide open meadows, replete with the simple harmonies of sunrise crows, twilight crickets and the exceptional fragrance of newly mowed grass and wild wood violets. His great grandmother would spend her summers as a child delving into the woods, looking for wild strawberry patches and black caps growing along the side of the road, probing water holes and brooks for magical polliwogs, turtles, minnows, even snakes that she invariably dragged back to the farmhouse, a favorite pastime.
    Instead, Scotty lived with the perpetual smells of hot air brakes, big rig exhaust and alley rat infested garbage. He got the sounds of gunshots and screams as the bullies of the neighborhood beat on their latest victim. His playground consisted of hot smelly asphalt and discarded cardboard boxes as his playthings.
    Luckily, his mom knew of a few areas that missed out on the progress. Like Sussex County. Full of rolling hills, mountains, packed trout streams and bucolic lakes. It even bragged some surviving timid black bears that penis challenged hunters failed to eradicated in their perpetual attempt to prove their manhood by putting food out for bears in the woods as they waited in trees with their weapons, shot-gunning them down, cubs and all.
    Hardly convenient, the wealthy found the remoteness objectionable, leaving no albatrosses for the government to tear down. The lack of access to mass transit, actually the reason the area stayed rural; undesirable to the masses for the same reason.
    An hour before dinner, Scotty’s parents started fighting again; the same old thing. His mother, one of the four million polio victims in the United States from the epidemic of 2018, frequently tried unsuccessfully to convince his father to relocate. She dreamed about better healthcare and quality of life in a less populated area. Like Sussex County.
    His big sister, Abby, a dialysis patient, needed to get to the hospital three times a week. As a toddler, she developed chronic kidney disease, acute and undoubtedly fatal, requiring her to go in and out of hospitals since a baby. She really needed a kidney transplant but they didn’t have the money to buy one from China or South America like most patients of loftier financial means.
    When the country decided to worship at the altar of socialized medicine, an understandably desperate shortage of doctors ensued. Over utilized emergency rooms with a standard back up of 36 hours on any normal day before the polio epidemic, suddenly morphed into requiring an appointment to get in. Dying before your appointment became common, creating a huge underground market, selling your appointment to the highest bidder. Family allowances limited the amount of doctor visits per year. Inevitably, rationing became as necessary as breathing.
    Simple sore throats or innocuous coughs, easily overlooked by busy adults trying to avoid burning a valuable medical visit, still spread germs. Unfortunately, polio was highly contagious. An airline passenger can infect an entire plane with one phlegmy throat. The government burden of bloated bureaucracy put the final nail in that coffin.
    The epidemic started because of a Muslim law, passed in 2005, in Northern Nigeria. They issued an Islamic Fatwa, declaring the polio vaccine part of a secret conspiracy by the United States and the United Nations against the Muslim faith. Their claim declared that the vaccine drops, secretly designed to sterilize the Muslim true believers, stimulated the virus. It then reappeared in Nigeria and spread throughout Africa. In this world of high-speed airline transportation it didn’t take long. Legal immigration figures show the number one source of immigrants in the good ol’ U.S.A. to be from Africa. And who could blame them.
    Amazingly, the United States, no longer the current super power, continued to draw the poor from all over the world as the land of milk and honey. In reality, it subsisted as the land of the free lunch. All U.S. border states now insisted on fences and guards. No longer could anyone jump the fence. The problem of illegal immigration, so obviously out of