Cold blanketed most of the United States on Thursday, February 5, 2009. Not the kind of cold that was usual for mid-winter, but a bone-chilling, brutal kind of cold that seemed to come from far below the depths of Hell. More pronounced, of course, in the north central regions of the country, the sub-zero temperatures kept reconstruction teams from working in most areas decimated from the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. bombs more than a year ago. Even in the southern regions of the country, residents tried to avoid the brisk winds that reached into the mid-twenties in areas used to 70-degree weather in February. For the first time in modern history, there were reports of coastal waters along Fort Lauderdale being sheeted with a thin layer of ice.
The 'Great Depression II' continued to wreak havoc on local economies. Tens of millions of Americans were unemployed; the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. shelters and food banks were overwhelmed with people looking for help. Warehouses of national chain stores - no longer operatinal - were raided and food was distributed to those in need. The most startling component of this mass outpouring was that it wasn't just the "poor" folks you'd expect to frequent these facilities; more and more, it was "middle-class" and "upper-middle-class" citizens who suddenly found themselves broke, homeless and hungry. As ongoing as this problem was, most citizens agreed that O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had done a far better job over the past year than the supercilious Bush administration had done following the Katrina hurricane disaster. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had coordinated efforts with local food banks, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries and thousands of local community service clubs to ensure a streamlined flow of assistance to all those in need. A volunteer army of millions of Americans was rebuilding homes, restoring infrastructures, and refurbishing public buildings as quickly as humanly possible. Los Angeles and Washington, DC were being rebuilt, although progress was woefully slow. Building materials were simply being confiscated from Lowe's, Menard's, Home Depot and WalMart warehouses all over the country. Factory inventories were being seized since those factories were no longer in production and their corporate headquarters had been blown off the face of the map.
Other O.U.T.R.A.G.E. experts were working on trying to resolve other issues. A convention of trade experts were engaged in a monumental effort to try and reduce America's $175 billion trade deficit. Due the ravished, weakened dollar, that deficit - mostly with China, of course - had ballooned to triple what it was in 2006.
O.U.T.R.A.G.E. scientists were trying to determine why global warming was causing gray whales to lose weight. This had been common knowledge for several years, but the Bush administration saw no need to concern itself with such trivial pursuits. It was preoccupied with war. As the whales lost weight, they also lost interest in breeding. Were fewer calves being born because there was less abundant food in the oceans? Or was the warming effects of the ocean promising to shoo one more species into extinction just because their habitat had been destroyed, thanks to mankind's industrial revolution? Either way, it was man's fault. If the water's temperatures were wrong for the whales, or if there wasn't enough food left to feed the whales, it was man's fault. If man's vehicle emissions, smoke-belching factories, and overall rape of the Earth and its atmosphere hadn't disrupted the natural cyclical order of global warming, perhaps gray whales would have naturally adapted to the new conditions over hundreds or thousands of years. But man's 150 years of "progress" had served only to speed up the progress on nature.....and hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals could keep up with such unatural change. Man had been a meddlesome quidnunc in the natural order of things, a busybody whose inventions of convenience and prosperity had ultimately inconvenienced the planet's timetables and touseled the prosperousness of normal Earthly cycles.
Money, power and influence had become man's mistress.

And, as is almost always the case, once the defloration of the mistress is completed, it's damned difficult to put that pandora back in the box.

Epimetheus learned that lesson in mythology; now modern man was about to learn the lesson all over again, thanks in part to pioneers like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, among many others.