Leigh Kimmel says:

Kids these days think that the Sharp Wars came out of nowhere. One day everything’s normal, just like it had since the Energy Wars ended and we went back to a peacetime economy. The next day some nut-job just about blows up the Arizona Memorial in his hair-brained scheme to avenge some buddies, and suddenly the entire Federal government comes down on everyone that’s been touched by biotechnology, whether cloning or genetic modification or just regeneration for a lost limb or injured spinal cord, and starts heaping restriction upon restriction.

In retrospect, the trouble had been brewing for years, at least back to the Energy Wars, if not the moment President Reagan went on national TV to announce to the American public that yes, the US had been operating its own secret human cloning and biomodification programs to counter those of the Soviets. I’m not sure whether the Purificationsts or the neo-Puritans were first, but I do know that the first neo-Puritan infiltration of our faith community started right about the time Patriarch Mikhail anathemized the Purificationists in the wake of a couple of highly-publicized terakts in Moscow. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church or the Catholic Church, a lot of the churches with Calvinist roots are congregationalist, and don’t have anyone like the Patriarch or the Pope to unequivocally condemn neo-Puritan positions. So there was no organized opposition when the neo-Puritans started pushing to get their people into elected office, both Federal and state. People who didn’t like it just moved to a different congregation, leaving the old one to be taken over.

Ike Liebowitz was trying to warn the country even when he was first running for governor in New York, but it went right past a lot of people because he was speaking from his own faith tradition. So a lot of people were looking for a direct repetition of what happened in the middle of the last century, and didn’t realize that just because history isn’t repeating itself directly, it can still rhyme.

By the time the first overtly anti-Sharp legislation came out in the months after the Arizona Memorial Incident, there were enough people whose opinions had been shifted that way that they didn’t see any problems with restricting people with biomodifications from certain lines of employment, or curtailing their freedom of movement by requiring identifying marks on their drivers’ licenses. In fact, a lot of people I knew, even members of my own family, viewed the opposition as a bunch of soreheads and troublemakers who hated reasonable restraint. So when things started turning kinetic, it was easy for the Flannigan Administration to spin the Sharp Resistance as a bunch of violent terrorists, bringing back all those memories of the Summer of Fear, the NASA Massacre, and all the horrors of the Energy Wars.

In the end we won and they lost. A modern knowledge-intense economy just can’t prosper while treating a significant portion of their best and brightest as the least and lowest, or exiling them to the far side of the world, or of the Moon.

Dupin says:

“That’s a tornado?”
“That it is.”
“It’s big.”
“It’s a bad one, young’un.”
“We going to the shelter?”
“In a minute. Storm’s not here yet. Tornado should miss us.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“Hope he and his are in their shelter. Hail might ruin our crops, but it looks like they’ll lose everything.”
“What can we do?”
“When the storm’s over, we’ll go there. There’s extra food in the cellar, extra beds if they need them, and Jimmy’s your size, so he can wear some of your if need be. That sound good.”
“I hope they’re okay.”
“Me too…me too.”