Greenies

'I guess not,' Lisa agreed. 'I was just asking. Being a poor Martian and all, I can't really afford stuff like that.'

'I'm not here to talk about your problems,' Jerome said sternly.

'Of course you aren't,' she said complacently. 'Please continue with your narrative.'

'Right,' he said, nodding carefully, unsure whether he was being condescended to or not but strongly suspecting that he was. 'So anyway, after they smashed my PC up, they threw me to the ground and one of them kicked me. He kicked me right in the face!'

'With his foot?' Lisa asked blankly.

'Of course with his foot! What else do people kick with? What's the matter with you people? I've been assaulted by a bunch of vermin! I want you to do something about it!'

'We are doing something about it,' Lisa told him. 'We're taking a report.'

'To hell with your report! I want them caught!' he yelled. 'I demand you go out and find them right now!'

'You demand?' Lisa said, letting a little chuckle escape. 'Listen to this crap, Bri. He demands.'

'He does seem very pushy, doesn't he?' he said, picking at a piece of fuzz on his chest armor.

Jerome looked at them in disbelief, clearly unaccustomed to being treated this way by mere civil servants — and greenie civil servants at that. 'Are you telling me that you're not going to do anything about this... this crime?'

'I told you,' Lisa said, 'we're taking a report. We'll log it as a misdemeanor assault and it'll go into the tracking computer as such.'

'And that's it?' he asked.

Lisa shrugged. 'The detective division will take a look at it when they get around to it,' she told him. 'That'll be when they work their way through the felony assaults that they have pending first.'

'And how long will that take?'

'Actually,' Lisa said with a smile, 'they'll probably never get around to it. You see, there are about five times as many felony assaults that come in as there are detectives to handle them. That's because the politicians that your little corporation and the others bribe to do their bidding won't let us kick loose any money to build jails and prisons. Therefore there's nowhere to put criminals even if we do catch them and since the criminals all know they won't be punished, there's really no reason for them not to assault someone when the opportunity arises. But you don't want to hear all about our greenie problems, do you? My point is that they have a hard time closing out the felony assault complaints so the misdemeanor assaults — like what happened to you — just sit there and accumulate month by month. I heard there was more than a hundred thousand of them pending, that sound about right to you, Bri?'

'Yep,' Brian agreed. 'That sounds pretty much on the mark.'

'I am an Agricorp executive,' the man said self-righteously. 'I was attacked by vermin! Surely you don't consider that an ordinary crime do you?'

'A crime's a crime,' Lisa told him.

'And a report's a report,' Brian added. 'Welcome to the wonderful world of Martian law enforcement. A world that your corporation helped create.'

The man kicked at the pieces of his PC angrily. 'You can't treat me like this,' he told them. 'Your administration will hear about this!'

Lisa and Brian both shrugged disinterestedly, both knowing that the captains and the deputy chiefs, career oriented pricks that they were, no longer officially gave a shit what corporate executives complained about. 'You go ahead and tell them,' Lisa said. 'But in the meantime, you wanna make the report or what? It doesn't really matter to me.'

'You'll be vermin by the end of the week,' the man threatened. 'I swear to you. I'll have your jobs!' With that he stomped off, taking his towel with him as he headed for the MarsTrans station two blocks over.

'I guess that'll be a no then,' Brian said.

'I guess so,' Lisa agreed, clearing the screen of her patrol computer and putting it back on her belt.

Six o'clock that evening found Matt and Jeff sitting in the latter's apartment, each with a fresh bottle of Fruity in their hands, watching the large Internet screen in the living room. They sat in scarred and battered plastic chairs that were older than their parents — furniture that had been purchased in a welfare store when Jeff and his new bride had set up housekeeping. In the kitchen Belinda was mixing up some sort of dish made from the cheap hamburger that was sold in the welfare grocery stores. The smell of cooking meat permeated the small living area.

On the screen Laura Whiting was just getting into her latest speech. The bi-weekly addresses were something that neither of the former gang members ever missed. There was something hypnotic and irresistible about being told by a politician just how they were all being fucked raw by the powers that be. The subject of today's speech was particularly interesting to them. It had to do with the perpetual class struggle between the Martian welfare class and the working class.

'You have to understand,' she told her audience, 'that this struggle is deliberate and pre-meditated by the corporations and the government that they've imposed upon us. It serves their interests for there to be strife between these two classes of people. If we are busy fighting each other and concentrating our energies on hating each other and what the other group stands for, we are much too distracted to concentrate any energy on the real enemy, the one who has put us in this position in the first place. It is a trick that is as old as repressive governments themselves. The British used it on the Irish Catholics and Protestants. The Americans used it on the poor whites and poor blacks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It's the old conquer by division trick and it has worked well here on Mars ever since the end of the Agricultural Rush.

'Most of those that we flippantly refer to as 'vermin' are not in that position because of their own choice. Most of them would sincerely love to put in an honest day's work and take home money that they've earned instead of having it handed to them by the government. But they cannot. There simply are not enough jobs under this system that we have. And every year the unemployment rate grows worse and worse as the corporations merge and adjust and adapt cost cutting measures in a quest for more profits. How long will it be before we reach forty percent unemployment? How long until four out of every ten people on this planet are called vermin? Not very long if we go on like this. Not very long at all.

'And how, you may ask me, does WestHem and the corporations perpetuate this class struggle between the welfare and the working? I've told you the why, but what about the how? It's quite simple really. They already have human nature working on their side — human nature that just loves to find a group of people that one's own group can hate. All they really have to do is take something from the more advantageous of the two classes and give it to the lesser. In this case I'm talking about welfare money. Working class tax dollars — already outrageously high in comparison to what upper class and corporations pay — is used to buy food, housing, alcohol and marijuana, health insurance, and lawyer insurance for the welfare recipients. It is used to give them their bi-monthly allotments of spending money. Now this act in and of itself is not really a bad thing. We should help those that are disadvantaged. But what it does is cast a stigma on the welfare class and cause resentment among the working class. This resentment is turned to hatred when the prices of food and clothing and housing are raised without a corresponding increase in working class salaries. The working class are forced to struggle to survive, working hard every day just to make enough to keep their children fed and their rent paid and they are given no assistance whatsoever in their endeavor. In a way they are made to feel punished because they work. At the same time the welfare class are handed everything that they need and are discouraged from even looking for work. They are taken care of as far as basic needs but they are forced to endure prejudice and mistreatment by police officers, healthcare workers, and others that they deal with in their lives.

'People, this has got to stop! If we're going to be successful in gaining our independence the welfare and the working classes are going to have to work together. Hospitals, doctors, nurses, you need to stop treating people differently because of their employment status and what kind of health insurance they have. If you participate in this prejudice, you are helping the corporations keep us down. Police officers, teachers, transit workers, you need to stop treating the welfare class differently than you do people with jobs. They are human beings just like yourself and they are Martians — the descendants of those who came to this planet to escape from the squalor of Earth. Just because your family has somehow managed to escape from this engineered squalor so far, you do not need to look down upon and mistreat those whose families have not. The welfare class do not choose to be put on welfare,