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Direct Democracy

Misty flipped through her cell phone as the bus came to a halt in traffic. Through her earbuds she listened to a video of the most recent public execution, making good on her oath never to watch one of the spectacles, as a form of personal protest.

As the execution crunched and wetly bludgeoned its way toward screaming finality, Misty busied herself with other digital matters.

First she swung over to the news and quickly flipped through the headlines. The most recent “yes” vote, allowing the merger of Newscorp with Rednews had made things even simpler then they’d already been. Now Misty just needed to sort by red or blue and she would get the same news as everyone else, just framed the way she preferred it.

Misty fancied herself a liberal – hadn’t she voted “yes” for drug legalization? – and so she sorted by blue news. The headlines were a mishegoss of typical trivialities – “Best Ten Shows To Binge This Weekend”, “Russian Prime Minister to President : ‘Prepare For Doomsday”, “Conservatives Drop The Ball On Climate Change, Again”, “Tom Cruise Dead At 96.”

Oh shit, Tom Cruise died? Misty thought to herself, at the same time as the torturer struck a particularly juicy blow and the convict – a pedophile whose trial had been livestreamed across the country – went silent.

When a user in Nebraska suggested a new national bill allowing torture for sex crimes against children, Misty, like almost everyone else, pressed “yes”. The bill passed with no real resistance.

Since then torture laws had been coming hard and fast and, last Misty had checked, they even allowed limited torture for de minimus crimes like theft of services and petit larceny. It was too far in Misty’s opinion, but all the expansions had passed with a strong majority.

Forgetting completely her fleeting remorse for Tom Cruise, Misty cringed at the moist plop of the executioner’s cudgle against what she imagined was the convict’s caved in skull. It must have been the killing blow because the audience began to applaud and an announcer came on.

Tune in for our 2PM execution later today when Barry Landrow, the “Newtown Slasher”, will be broken on the wheel.

Having lost interest, Misty shut the video off and swiped into the voting app to see what bills were up for a vote today.

At the very top, voted on by over 95 million people, was the “Sally T. Hinton” bill, a popular and specific law drafted by a Texan user who went by the avatar Killemdead989. The bill was a direct response to the accidental killing of Sally. T. Hinton by her husband.

The poor man had backed into his wife as he drove off to work, but a livestream of the event went viral and it showed Sally’s husband was looking at his phone when it happened. The local District Attorney refused to prosecute, saying they could not prove a crime had been committed, but the People weren’t satisfied with that.

The Sally T.Hinton bill was basically a national license empowering any American citizen to kill Sally’s husband, Bernard Hinton, on sight. It was perhaps the most contentious bill in the three years since personal lawmaking had taken effect and Misty was still debating how to vote. Currently the “yes” vote had it at %50.02 to %49.96 with %.02 abstaining.

Misty decided to shelve the decision for a second and scroll through the other options, noting that the voting window would be over in just four more minutes. She scrolled down the list, haphazardly voting yes to a bill entitled “Free Jeremy,” although she had no idea who Jeremy was. She was a firm “no” on yet another bill attempting to illegalize abortion, a daily phenomenon. She abstained from a vote about foreign policy – something to do with nuclear deterrence – as she did not feel she was qualified to take a position – itself a position she felt was very wise. Lastly she voted yes on a bill to allocate 1 million dollars to the creation of a fund for unemployed mimes – probably a joke bill, but currently %93 of voters agreed with her.

With only two minutes remaining, Misty returned to the Sally. T. Hinton bill and bit her lower lip. It was a real nail biter this one. On the one hand, Misty felt a little uncomfortable with the whole idea of the law. It would be the first time such a law had ever passed and the implications were a little scary.

Then Misty played the attached video one more time and watched as Bernard Hinton, his face glued to his phone, ran right over his poor wife.

Confident that she would never do anything so stupid, Misty consigned Mr. Hinton into the mental category of total dickhead and pressed “yes.” Ten seconds later voting ended and the bill passed into law. Twenty seconds after that social media was awash in photos of Mr. Hinton shot dead in his front lawn. Apparently several citizens were waiting for the vote to complete, and now they were all fighting over who got the kill shot.

As the bus pulled up to Misty’s office she saw that one of the men had claimed victory, a John Paul Henry, 24, from Wisconsin. He’d driven down to Texas and waited in the forest near Hinton’s home, just in case the law passed.

Moments later Henry posted a picture of himself holding Hinton’s dead body up, rifle in Henry’s hand, like one of those big game hunter photos. Misty found it all quite distasteful.

Just as the bus doors opened up, Misty got a notification for a new bill to vote on. She read the title and laughed to herself, then pressed “Yes” without thinking and stepped off the bus to go to work.

All across America the “Permission To Kill John Paul Henry, 24 from Wisconsin” bill was quickly gaining steam – out of 50,000 voters “yes” already had 45,000 votes.

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