Plenty of people were donating their labor, too. Most of them were rural middle class people who had always worked. They were active country people who didn’t like to sit around. Besides, no one really had a “job” anymore. Most people had an itch to get out and do something.
They wanted to help their neighbors, and they wanted their neighbors to help them. That meant work, like helping a neighbor move a relative’s belongings to a new house within Pierce Point, cutting firewood, clearing a patch of ground for a garden, or fixing small equipment, like chainsaws.
They also needed something to take their minds off all the destruction and despair. They couldn’t count on their old crutch of TV or the internet anymore.
TV was the worst. It was full of “news” that everyone knew was fake; lots of puff pieces about how great things were. Inspiring stories of how neighbors were helping neighbors, with the help of the Freedom Corps, of course. The stories on TV made it seem like neighbors could never just help each other without the organizing wisdom of the government. Watching TV would depress a normal person, who could look outside and see how the official channels were full of lies. Most non-news channels were taken off the air. Had they been on the air, they would have been reruns of reality shows or other things showing the prosperity of the past. With gangs running gas stations, the government wasn’t keen on people watching a show from two years ago about million-dollar cars. It would be too much of a contrast between the present and the past.
The authorities started running reruns of popular sitcoms from the past few decades. Old standbys. The shows that brought people together into one common America and reminded people of better times. Grant remembered that during 9/11, viewership of old I Love Lucy episodes went through the roof.
The authorities also wanted to numb peoples’ minds. They constantly played reruns of all the trashy daytime shows where people went on and accused their boyfriends of sleeping with their sisters and that kind of thing. Celebrity shows were also all over TV. They showed celebrities doing…whatever it was that celebrities did. Some of the shows featured celebrities helping people, with the help of the government, of course. The shows would depict this movie star or that one talking to truckers about how the authorities were getting the freight moved to the cities where people needed it. But, mostly it was mindless gossip about the stars.
The dependent and unproductive—the Oblivious, as Grant called them—would just sit in their houses for hours and watch this. Then they would wonder who would be feeding them. Their way of coping was to pretend everything was like it used to be. Then again, they were so dependent on government that they wouldn’t have had the skills to cope even if they’d wanted to. The government had been taking care of them their whole lives. They didn’t know how to feed themselves or protect themselves. So they just sat around and waited for the authorities to take care of them, even though there were no longer any authorities. It made no sense, but things were so out of whack from normal that some people couldn’t process the change. They wanted “normal” back. So they pretended—contrary to everything they saw around them—that things were normal again.
This was classic “normalcy bias.” It was an epidemic in the cities. The more dependent people were, the easier it was to fall into normalcy bias because they had no way of handling the new situation. The government counted on normalcy bias. They managed normalcy bias by trying to create the illusion of normalcy and then directing people to act like they had in normal times, which was to do what the government said. Hence, the reruns and fake news on TV.
The internet was much the same. The government had acquired “emergency” powers to control it. It was hard, of course, to totally prevent Patriot websites and communications. A person might be blocked on nine out of ten attempts to find Patriot web information, but would get through on the tenth try. There weren’t really any police left, so no one cared if the authorities knew that a computer they were using was accessing a “terrorist” website. This was less true in the cities where there were more police or, more accurately, FC. They would get lists of people accessing restricted websites and go “visit” them. The FC would try to intimidate people and, on occasion, take them in. This was to cause fear among the population. The government really didn’t have the facilities to jail everyone, so they let most of them go, after taking away their FCards.
Thinking of the cities and all the government controls reminded Grant once again of how good they had it at Pierce Point. The productive people at Pierce Point were working hard to take care of themselves and their neighbors. Drew and his assistants were merely keeping track of who was helping, but they were not trying to direct it. They weren’t the government. People at Pierce Point could tell the difference. They liked the approach out there. Individuals at the Grange, like Drew, were there to help, but not control things, which was such a welcome change from what had been happening for the past few years.
People were rediscovering their own self-sufficiency. It felt good to take care of themselves and others. They had a sense of pride after spending all day canning or drying food and then having something to show for it. Many people hadn’t had that sense of pride in quite some time. They had gone to jobs in cubicles and come home and watched TV. Life was more…real now. More like it was supposed to be.
Grant pulled Drew aside so people couldn’t hear the conversation. “Are you getting a sense of who is on board out here and who the slackers are?” Grant asked.
“Yep,” Drew said. “I see the same names on the donation records. The same people seem to be coming up to me to ask if anyone needs to borrow their truck or if anyone needs help with a project. Most of the people are like that.”
“What about the lazy people?” Grant asked. He knew the answer.
“Well,” Drew said, “their names don’t show up in my records, so we could figure out who they are by a process of elimination.”
That was exactly what Grant had thought. In an instant, he decided to start “keeping files” on people. Not files, really, just a map. He had to. Soon, resources would be scarce and it would be unfair to start giving things away to people who weren’t contributing. That could split the community apart, and they needed the community solidly together in order to survive. Survive, Grant said again to himself. Keeping files on people is about surviving. Don’t let it turn into anything else.
“Yeah,” Grant said to Drew. “Could you get the master lot map and come up with small maps showing the helpful and unhelpful so I can have them?” Grant would add the Patriot, Loyalist, Undecided, and Oblivious labels himself after he had evidence in each case. Helpful people weren’t necessarily Patriots and unhelpful people weren’t necessarily Loyalists. The map would label both community contributions and political leanings. Grant would use the list of contributors, regardless of their politics, for the decisions on allocating resources. That would show he was being fair. This would bring many of the Undecideds, who were the majority of the population, over to the Patriot side. If a Loyalist was contributing, then great. He or she would be rewarded and the Undecideds would see that.
Creating this map would be a lot of work. Oh well. Grant needed to have a command of these important details. He couldn’t delegate this one. This was really important. He had to know, with specificity, who the good and bad guys were. This was his job now. He still would judge cases and might kick down doors on raids now and again, but his main job was political and administrative, as Pierce Point solidified from a group of people to a mini-republic. It wouldn’t just happen with luck. It would take hard work to get things formed right so Pierce Point could be a model.