ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Steph Myers finished the podcast and shook his head. He knew little about this. But he knew the general they were talking about. He was sure of it. He had heard something about this when he was in the army. Dooley had told him. A good man taken out. Never got that last star.
He opened What’s App and sent Dooley a message. CHECK THIS OUT. SERIOUSLY MESSED UP! He copied in a link. He couldn’t wait to hear what Dooley would say.
He only recently had begun to get into this kind of stuff, these places on the web. What he couldn’t figure out was what had happened. It was like an illness. America had gone from being the country that made the things that everyone in the world wanted to being a country that didn’t make anything for itself. Americans had become sad, defeated, overweight.
STEPH HAD TO DO SOMETHING. HE COULDN’T KEEP TEACHING kids seventh grade social studies when the country was falling apart. He couldn’t teach them about the American dream, the promise of liberty and opportunity, when the factories had all closed up and all the jobs had been shipped away. He couldn’t teach it and not believe it.
How had it happened? How had the world changed so much since he was a kid? How had the country not seen it coming? How had he not seen it coming?
There were answers. But they weren’t in the usual places. They weren’t on TV or in the newspaper. He didn’t believe in cover-ups and conspiracies, of course not. But there were people out there trying to find the truth. And he was beginning to discover who those people were and where they were talking to each other.