When ... (or Baby Tattoos, Sensible-Eaters Anonymous and Middle Class Nomads)

When …
China becomes the world’s largest economy Americans will no longer be able to afford to adopt Chinese babies. On the bright side, infertile upper middle class Chinese couples will now be wealthy enough to start adopting American babies from Detroit, Los Angeles and Kansas City. Poor little American kids will be groomed by US orphanages who will market these children as a race of “giant” people with the potential to rap in Mandarin. Natural born Chinese kids will still excel in economics and engineering, but Chinese moms and dads with adopted American children will take special pride in their children who – like the Buddha – seem to be able to sit and do nothing at all as they stare into tiny cell phone screens communicating in short IM “proverbs” that impart their wisdom using only words made from punctuation marks and two and three letter acronyms (i.e.: omg).

When …
Every last man and woman in America gives in to peer pressure and gets a tattoo, they will then begin tattooing their children, imprinting them with Sponge Bob Square Pants and Little Mermaid tattoos alongside permanent script that reads “My Parents Took Me To Mexico But All I Got Was this Lousy Tattoo.” These tattoos will be rationalized in the same way that we now rationalize dressing our kids to match us in skinny jeans with diaper flaps and miniature Dolce and Gabbana sun glasses that double as teething rings. No child will be considered complete or socially acceptable without “ink” from a high-end tattoo parlor and on special occasions proud moms and dads will take their children to visit their great grandparents where they will compare great granddad’s tattoo commemorating his lost platoon in Vietnam with little Eric’s tattoo commemorating the cast of MTV’s The Jersey Shore.

When ...
The entire population of the US is overweight from six-meals-a-day of junk food and the high-fructose corn syrup that has been put into everything from frozen vegetables to rescue inhalers, the top three reality shows in the country will be The Biggest Human, So You Think You Can Eat and America’s Got Food. Any remaining thin people in the country will be shamed into going to Sensible-Eaters Anonymous where they will learn how to break their addiction to eating in moderation (”Hi my name is Steven and last night (sob, sniffle) I ate 23 grams of fiber with no trans fat in my organic stir fry”). At the end of these meetings, massively obese old-timers will attempt to hug new comers without crushing them while, instead of coffee and cookies, a buffet of 2700 calorie individual meat-topped, stuffed crust pizzas will be served to help attendees continue to overcome their twin demons of intelligence and good sense … one pie at a time.

When ...
The US tax code and banking system finally eliminates the American Middle class, leaving only the super rich and the very poor, a few remaining middle class nomads will continue to wander the land through high-end malls and housing developments looking for the American Dream. Middle class nomad Fathers will stand next to their daughters and sons pointing through the windows of large houses at the hi-def TVs and stackable washer / driers they used to be able to buy, while rootless Moms will stop wandering just long enough to mime sitting at kitchen tables where their children will pretend to do their homework. At the same time, the nation’s super rich leaders will have convinced the very poor that the American middle class was only a myth perpetuated by the Obama administration and other American Democrats who will by this time have also all become extinct.

When …
National, state and local governments at last convince every US citizen that terrorists are all around us, it will be considered an act of patriotism for US citizens to call 911 whenever they witness an old lady covering her curlers with a head scarf. No college kid walking out of a Middle Eastern restaurant with a falafel will be able to hide from the watchful American eye, and It will be the little things we do that make us heroes (such as lining the bottom of our bird cages with Arabic language newspapers and teaching our dogs to sniff out copies of the Koran at local yard sales). Soon America will have become so vigilant and paranoid that we will even start turning ourselves into detention centers at which point actual terrorists will have no one left to attack and will be forced to leave the country, proving once again that American determination can conquer all.

When …
When YouTube, Facebook and Twitter become the only form of human communications left in the world, people will no longer have the attention span or skills to acquire information by reading anything longer than 140 characters. The titles on required reading lists will be the only thing that students are actually required to read and the only way to get us to sit still to take in complete ideas will be to entertain us with funny voices and scantily clad teenagers. At the same time, business proposals that involve any consideration by meeting participants will have to be created in the form of short video clips where animated characters draw pie charts and then hit each other in the face with them. No one left alive will remember what it was like to read a novel or a newspaper and publishers will be forced to create a new form of literature called the “eMotiBook” which will reduce great pieces of literature down to a short series of webdings and emoticons. For instance Romeo and Juliet would become: “YLN”while a Tale of Two Cities would look like this: “C/D”. At the same time, the front page of the New York Times would be boiled down to: “— --@pMÿZQ‡üÛ>”  and the entire contents of all you just read would - in the end - simply be summed up as follows: “ü?ÿ….”