What would America be Like if it was Like Gaza?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – What would America be like if it was like Gaza?

On October 8, 2023, the Alien invasion long feared by science fiction buffs and Area 51 conspiracy theorists finally materialized, as unidentified anomalous phenomena (a.k.a. UFOs) appeared over America’s skies.

The Aliens from beyond Pluto intercepted the US internet and announced that US exploratory satellites had killed thousands of their numbers with toxic electromagnetic transmissions and that they considered all US military personnel and veterans potential security threats. They would proceed to kill all of them. These targets included 1.29 million active duty service members along with 800,000 reserve and national guard members, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. They also included 16 million veterans. The Aliens hacked into all US databases and secured personal details of all these personnel including photos for facial recognition software. They deployed robots with video surveillance capabilities orders to track down and kill them all.

The Alien commander, whose name is unpronounceable by humans, announced that all Americans living in the north of the country within 500 miles of the Canadian border must immediately abandon their homes and head south to the middle of the country.

The president, the cabinet and the top generals disappear into underground bunkers in Washington, D.C. and Colorado, and their communication with the public is cut.

The invaders provoke panic, impelling movement by hitting Ft. McCoy in Wisconsin, Fort Lewis in Washington State, and Fort Richardson and Fort Wainwright in Alaska. They also began hitting big residential complexes. They brought down the Residences Water Square in Detroit, killing all the families there who hadn’t managed to finish packing and leaving; they hit One Eleven in Chicago, with its 58 floors and 504 units, collapsing it on residents; and struck Rainier Square Tower in Seattle,

The aliens target bridges, water purification plants, and hospitals. Space lasers sliced through Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Michigan, the Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine, and other facilities in the north of the country. Patients tried to hobble into the parking lot, some on crutches, others carrying stands with intravenous solutions and others in wheelchairs with oxygen canisters. Newborn premies were abandoned and died in their neonatal intensive care units when the electricity was cut by the lasers.

As panicked families packed what goods they could into their cars and headed south, long traffic jams impeded their progress on routes such as I-15 down from Missoula, Montana and I-35 down from Duluth, Mn. Some take surface roads. Families that did not have a car were forced to try to take buses or to walk, carrying sleeping bags and pup tents. Those families with one of the 16 million military veterans in them often found themselves vaporized from the skies The aliens struck at the veteran at night as he gathered with family and friends, wiping out the vet and his entire family.

“Liberty under Attack,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024

As they intensively bombarded the northern states the aliens began going after university campuses. The University of Washington, Seattle, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Northwestern University in Illinois, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and Dartmouth are all vaporized, along with their presidents, provosts, regents, administrative staff, and large numbers of professors and students. Prominent American poets and artists are struck with antimatter beams as they read their verses or sing their lyrics. All bands covering “Born in the USA” are turned into pink mist as soon as they get through the first few bars.

Enormous tent cities grow up in the middle of the country around Dover, Del., Philadelphia, St. Louis, Kansas City, and San Francisco. Since the northern plains farmers couldn’t get in their crops, food shortages begin. The aliens knock out bakeries. The entire Panera and Dunkin Doughnut chains are turned into carbon dust. Hungry crowds attack grocery stores and loot canned goods, but often have no way to cook them, since the aliens begin knocking out electricity plants and targeting oil depots.

By the end of the first two months of the campaign, 1.5 million Americans are dead and several million more wounded, with half the casualties being children.

Then the Alien commander announces that everyone in the middle states must move to the south, as UFOs begin obliterating the cities celebrated in the old Nat King Cole song, Route 66 — St. Louis and Oklahoma City among them. New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Fresno, Bakersfield are all reduced to rubble, The aliens concentrate on monuments of nationals pride, melting down the Statue of Liberty, pulverizing the Empire State Building, slicing the Washington Monument in two, leveling the National Cathedral, uprooting the St. Louis Gateway Arch and pounding the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip. They zero in again on universities, leveling Harvard and Princeton, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and Colorado. Famous novelists are picked off from above with their entire families.

“Vegas gone Bust,” Digital, Dream / Dark Fantasy v3, 2024

By now 200 million people have been expelled from their homes, heading south like famished locusts, looting towns along the way as food grows ever scarcer. The aliens now hit the nation’s water supply, taking out water purification plants, urban water pipe networks, and the major dams. When their lasers breach the Hoover Dam, the populations of Needles, California; Lake Havasu, Arizona, Laughlin, Nevada;, Yuma, Arizona, and San Luis Rey, Colorado are washed away. People are reduced to drinking from puddles in polluted fields, often the same fields they now use as latrines because so many buildings with indoor bathrooms have been destroyed. Epidemics of cholera, dysentery, and watery diarrhea break out. Babies perish in large numbers from dehydration.

America’s new most populous cities are Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala., Jackson, Mississippi, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, La., Dalls-Ft. Worth, Houston and Brownsville, Texas, Phoenix, Az,, Albuquerque, N.M., and Los Angeles and San Diego in California. Their populations mushroom to twenty million each, like Calcutta or Mumbai or Mexico City. All 340 million Americans are crowded into a narrow band of southern states, living in tents, in squalid circumstances, baking in the heat.

17,000,000 Americans are dead. Most have to be plowed into mass graves by earth movers where fuel can be found to operate them. 60 million Americans are wounded or crippled, half of them children. One-legged and one-armed children are common sights, as are children with extensive burns and disfigured faces.

Now the aliens announce an invasion of the southern states and decree the expulsion of residents back up to the middle country, where there are no longer any houses or apartments to live in, where there are no schools, universities or hospitals and only a handful of clinics. Atlanta is reduced to a pile of concrete. Tampa’s military command, already hit once, is now pulverized. The French Quarter of New Orleans, where the Pirate Lafitte and Andrew Jackson planned the defense of the coast from a British naval invasion, is made into a pile of old rocks. Los Angeles’ downtown towers, fallen so many times in CGI celluloid, are taken down for real this time. Another wave of American refugees, poorer and more desperate than John Steinbeck’s Okies of the Great Depression, run for their lives back to the middle of the country. They pitch tattered tents on the ruins of St. Louis and Iowa City.

Then it is announced that all Americans will have to live along the Pacific Coast, with new wagon trains or just barefoot pedestrians streaming out West, stuffing 310 million people into the places that 40 million Californians lived. 30 million are dead, 15 million of them children. 80 million are injured or sick. Millions stubbornly refuse to leave their cities in the middle Atlantic and stoically suffer through bombardments. Tens of thousands of people are killed every day. In the far west, people desperately glean crops or burrow into the rubble of Ralph’s grocery stores and collapsed Walmarts looking for canned goods.

The millions of people sleeping rough in close proximity to one another without toilets and drinking dirty water cause disease outbreaks. A polio epidemic sweeps through infants who were never vaccinated, blighting their bodies and paralyzing and deforming their legs. Millions of huddled refugees in Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Huntington Beach and San Diego become bone thin and emaciated. Bands of orphans form, with millions of children having lost parents and relatives, to forage for food for one another. Some desperate whites try to flee south to Mexico but the Mexican immigration authorities erect an impenetrable wall to keep them out.

Millions wander dazed, not knowing where their next meal will come from. Some try to go fishing off the California coast, but the aliens’ lasers slice their fishing boats in two. The de facto death toll climbs to 34 million. Some 85 million of the 131 million households in the US have been annihilated. People are desperate, but each day brings worse news than the one before. There is no end in sight, as the merciless aliens announce new campaigns weekly.