 |
 |
|
M I G H T Y P E N A N D S W O R D Six hundred new hydrogen powered Personal Vehicles are moving off the freighter and onto the wharf at the Primary Receiving Center in New Orleans. They leave in unison, five emerging vehicles from five deck bridges traveling at exactly six kilometers an hour, following a guidance grid to waiting rail car carriers. Another perfectly timed shipment using the S-GACS: Satellite Guided Automated Cargo Ship. Almost no Human-workers noticed this event. And few Human-workers noticed these vehicles leaving the assembly point in Africa, or for that matter, their assembly. From creation to delivery, a total of 150 workers monitored and controlled the integrated sequence of events. A total of 85,000 full time employees make up the research, manufacturing and sales groups for the world's largest auto manufacturer, GenSan-V, once General Motors, Nissan, and Volvo. Fifty years ago, there were four automotive distributors in Moscow, Indiana. There are now two, and Norma J. is about to pick up her new GenSan-V 2050, Personal Vehicle from one of them. For this employee, today marks the second exciting work-related event this year. The first was being accepted into the Unified Healthcare Hospice training program, a private corporation set up by the Federal government designed to take care of terminally ill patients; a job she has always wanted, and one of the social service jobs phased out decades ago to reduce Federal spending. Ironically, the conversion to integrated automated production systems had eliminated so many jobs that, recently, federal and state governments had been forced to resurrect some careers which previously had been thought dispensable, or were tolerated under a system called Work-Welfare. National Professions Institute employees like Norma J. receive a discount on trade-ins from GenSan-V. Norma was happily turning in the old for the new. *** Imagine yourself the owner of Shakespeare & Co., a large bookstore on Broadway, on the upper west side of Manhattan--a family institution known in the neighborhood for decades. The old wooden shelves are filled with books on all three stories of the building. You know your customers, they have come to know and respect your selections. Two years ago, a Barnes & Noble opened two blocks up the street. You tried to compete, but you didn't have the space for a cafe, nor the resources for mega-marketing. Now you're selling everything--the books, the bookshelves. 1 *** Driving on the interstate at seventy-five miles an hour, and in town at forty or fifty, someone is usually behind you--and they're right on your tail fifteen or twenty feet away. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that tailgating is "a major cause of crashes that can result in serious injury," but that fact isn't recognized anymore.2 Fog, or clear skies ahead--you, and everyone else, have an arrangement: you're pushing to get somewhere, everywhere, all the time. 1. Shakespeare & Co., on 80th Street & Broadway, NYC, closed in 1996. 2. Document DOT HS 808 556, April 1997, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/. |
|
|