Positive Reconstruction

Keeping It Personal - Marty Jr. and Jillian

As a teen, Marty Jr watched his father struggle to find employment after the big box store he managed closed for good on Christmas Eve, 2008. While the family never experienced homelessness during the Great Recession, money became a lot tighter. Some of his childhood friends moved with the families in search of work, while others unofficially moved in with Marty’s family on-and-off as their home lives became increasingly unstable. Junior managed to secure scholarships and Pell grants to pay for college, and while he wanted to study linguistics, he found he had a knack for computer language. After graduation in 2015, he found work at a cybersecurity company, and soon after met Tina, the woman he wanted to marry. By 2020, Marty Junior settled into a stable family life, a sense of security which had been torn away from him as a teen. 

Then his father died. Little brother Bobby showed up drunk at the funeral. Family drama ensued. Jillian had choice words for both brothers. Their mother had a nervous breakdown. It was a mess, but at least Marty had his job and wife. With a baby, Trey, on the way, Marty moved his mother into the granny shack behind their Ann Arbor home, and put his nose to the old grindstone. By 2025, Marty is 33, now a father of two, and a member of an Elks lodge. A true pillar of the community. 

The cybersecurity firm which Marty works for recently received a fat contract from a certain government defense contractor. They’ve been tasked with monitoring social media chatter for anti-government sentiments across Michigan and northern Indiana. While others at the firm express displeasure at the intrusive nature of this surveillance, Marty loses no sleep over it. When the firm’s AI software picks up on a ‘radical’ group chat involving immigrants’ rights activists seeking to warn communities of impending ICE raids, Marty dutifully hands that information off to law enforcement. In his mind, these groups will interfere with public safety, causing the kind of chaos associated with his little brother. As America continues to destabilize and 2025 draws to a close, Marty silently promises himself he will not let the floud winds battering the nation, to disrupt his home life.

Jillian doesn’t remember much before the age of five, but remembers with terrifying clarity her kindergarten teacher breaking down as a passenger jet crashed into a tall building on TV. After that, childhood became little more than a series of crises and threat indicators. Adults transformed from gentle protectors to vengeful gods, always shouting and never taking time to explain anything. By the time Jillian enters her tween years, the Great Recession gutted those gods, reducing them to pale husks of themselves. 

The sense that her family life was dying combined with the teenage urge to leave, to explore. Jillian spent hours wandering the mordibund mall at the edge of town. running her hands along metal railings, inhaling the stale air in search of a taste of the lost innocence of what must have been a simple, or at least more optimistic time. In this temple to American consumerism, she listened to the hushed conversations of older kids about the before times. How beautiful the 90s must have been.

In high school, Jillian made the mistake of doing well on standardized tests. Offer letters showed up, enticing her to apply to this or that university. Her mother’s trembling hands gripped hers, imploring her to make something of herself. With her father’s health failing, Jillian heard in her mother’s desperate voice a clarion call; “This world is ill, and you must tend to it.”

Earning a pre-med bachelors only took Jillian three years, but she had a full scholarship, so she took a fourth year to finish a dual degree in French language and literature. But as the acceptance letters from medical schools flooded in, with them came cost estimates, and lighter offers of financial aid. Jillian began to dread those letters, until one arrived from a medical school in Quebec. Nervously, Jenny took an entrance exam in French, which she barely passed. Two years into med school, her father died. The funeral became, in her mind, a liberating event, for nothing tethered her to Michigan any more. She considered staying in Canada. 

But life comes at you fast, and by 2025, Jenny found herself wrapping up residency and opening a non-profit clinic in a poor corner of Ohio with her husband. Chris had a knack for business, and figured he would be able to make the dire economics of running a doctor’s office work. The newlyweds hired a few friends to help run the place and put out their shingle. While the clinic stayed (barely) in the black, their creditors informed Jillian the clinic’s debt had been sold to a private equity firm. The new bosses were not the same as the old ones, and soon demanded cost-cutting measures and fatter profit margins. They told Jillian that marginalized communities don’t turn a profit, and that her clinic needed to turn away Medicaid patients, as many were set to lose their benefits in the near future. The clinic New Years Eve party was a somber affair.