Welcome to the new millenium.

Really, it's almost a surprise we made it to the beginning of the millenium - the real millenium, not the "Year 2000" bullshit that the media and entertainment outlets hyped.

The Y2K bug turned out worse than expected. Dozens of poorer Third-World nations (under-developed, for you political correctness nazis) were screwed when their power grids failed. A lot of the big industrial countries suffered quite a bit, too. Here in the US, there were hundreds of smaller problems all over the place, from generators failing to air-traffic control systems going out of whack. Most of the hardware problems were nothing spectacular - half-a-dozen states were issuing licenses to "horseless carriages" for the 2000 model year (so much for that "Y2K Ready" nonsense).

President Clinton got (yet another) black eye when his FAA Y2K Readiness stunt almost backfired. A commercial jet carrying his Transportation Secretary and a few other bigwigs disappeared from radar somewhere over New Mexico on its way to San Francisco at the stroke of midnight, January 1st, 2000. It turns out a bunch of militia-survivalist types decided to encourage the end of the "New World Order/Black Helicopter/United Nations overthrow of the legitimate American Constitution" by blowing up FAA radar sites "used to track the movements of patriotic Americans".

Actually, a lot of that happened in the first few days of 2000. Between all the ignorant slobs celebrating the beginning of the new millenium (a year early) and the extremist nuts wanting to take out the federal government, a lot of the larger cities looked more like southern Lebanese cities than North American economical powerhouses.

Several governors declared martial law in the larger cities, and Clinton made US Army regulars available for additional support gaining control of the riot damaged metropolitan regions. Of course, more extremists jumped out of the woods when Clinton made that announcement - now he was using the Army to oppress Americans!

The rest of 2000 was relatively calm, although public confidence never returned to its level before the Troubles began. More ineffective feel-good legislation got passed, from federal hate-crime legislation (practically anything other than a male white Anglo-Saxon Protestant was covered by this one - including some domestic pets!) to new gun control legislation (30 day waiting periods, background checks, DNA checks, sacrificing your first born son, agreeing to BATF no-knock home inspections whenever some bureaucrat's pissed because his secretary won't sleep with him, and so on - laws that are only selectively enforced in California and New York metropolitan areas anyway) to the National Identification Act (every citizen must have a NIA card to receive any government support).

The entertainment-media conglomerate decided around mid-2000 that January, 2001 was really the beginning of the millenium, so a huge media blitz guaranteed that law enforcement was going to have another busy night.

Good ol' "Dubya" is president. He managed to outspend the Democratic National Committee almost two-to-one, so it was a given that he'd walk away with the big prize back in November. He gave one of his big campaign platforms, education, a serious work-over. Now, for any American to earn his NIA card (and voting rights), that American has to pass a core competencies test that covers reading, writing, arithmetic, and civics. "Dubya" picked 1925 standards as appropriate, because, as he said, "back then, Americans had to learn things. We didn't have this liberal feel-good system of public schools. Americans had to learn real facts in the old days."

Most of the larger cities are worse off than they were back in '99. People already talk about the "Good Old Days of the 20th Century". Private "security firms" have cropped up in most medium- to large-sized cities. These firms provide a wide array of services, from paramilitary training to site security to "pest removal". Most of the local cops (in smaller cities, at least) turn a blind eye to these operations, since they provide a valuable service to the public (drug-related violence was down 30% in mid 2001 compared to the previous year), but the Feds are very upset at just how common these agencies have become, and even more upset at the wide array of military weapons that these agencies seem to possess illegally. The Feds have their own term for private security firms: mercenaries.