Game over. We lose. Roughly following the precedent of Portugal and Spain's Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, China and the Postal Service will partition their conquered territory with an imaginary line through Omaha, Nebraska. The People's Republic will claim everything east of the line and the Postmaster General everything to the west.
In short order, Worker's Vanguard will outsell the Wall Street Journal in the Big Apple and stamp machines will replace slot machines in Vegas. Communist banners will go up as Confederate flags go down in South Carolina and dogs will be banned for life from front yards in California. New Hampshire convicts will stamp "Mao was Right, We Were Wrong" instead of "Live Free or Die" on state license plates and Oregon students will wear USPS uniforms to school, carry books from class to class in mail sacks and call for a ride home from thirty-three cent pay phones. Only a scattered band of resistors will remain of the once-mighty U.S. of A.
That's where Utah comes in.
At present, the population of China is approximately 1,250,000,000 and the number of Mormons worldwide is a mere 10,500,000. Assume, however, that China's communist cadres continue their country's policy of zero population growth while The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps garnering converts and encouraging large families to the tune of, say, five percent expansion a year. By 2099, Mormons will outnumber Chinese by a healthy margin of 65,012,578 men, women and children.
Quarterbacked by Steve Young VII in the east, our Mormon comrades will push the Chinese overlords so far downfield they'll be back across the North Pacific in no time. Meanwhile, the descendants of former Federal Express and United Parcel Service agents will swarm every zip code west of Omaha to deliver defeat to the dreaded USPS--overnight guaranteed.
Okay--so chances are that everything will work out all right in the end. But when it comes to an issue as important as drug testing in the workplace, do we really want to leave our future to chance?
Jeremy N. Smith '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.
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