The Movement

Chapter Six - Part 4

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President Barber entered the conference room in a scurry. The door closed silently behind him as he scanned the conference table and the cabinet members’ faces.

“Good morning,” he greeted quickly.

“Good morning,” replied a blend of mumbled, desynchronized voices.

“As you know,” began President Barber, reaffixing his tie, “we need to get things going here. We need to move fast, indeed very fast. We need to establish these new policies as soon as we can. Yesterday we settled one reform. Today let’s go for more. There was some argumentation and disagreements yesterday, as expected. It’s simply part of the dialect process to ensure the best reforms; however, Mr. Duckworth and I will be bringing in each of you one at a time to formulate the reforms together. Again, we need these proposed reforms devised quickly, and three minds can work together more fluidly than twelve. We will not finish this process today; nor tomorrow. But by the end of the week I aim to complete these reform plans. I will call each of you—independently—into my office to dialect and devise these reforms for installment. Let’s get the job done,” said President Barber in a direct voice. “Dr. Snyder, you’re up first, right now.”

Dr. Snyder stood up from his seat and tipped the president a single nod. President Barber nodded back, then marched out of the Conference room. Troy followed suit, with Dr. Snyder following directly behind.

After a short commute down the hallway and into the elevator, the three men renewed their quick-paced walk down another marble-white hallway into a large office. The office was decorated with heavy scarlet curtains that slung over what appeared to be windows. The room was carpeted with blue and golden rugs and frills. Matching cherry oak desks, bookcases, and coffee tables were disbursed throughout the office. The president’s main desk was incredibly large, nearly twice that of Dr. Cole’s Princeton office. Behind the desk sat a large leather chair, and behind it on the wall lay an old painting portrait of George Washington.

“Dr. Snyder, Mr. Duckworth, welcome to my office,” welcomed President Barber, walking around his desk and standing behind it. “Please, seat yourselves,” he suggested, casting his outreached hand towards two leather chairs, angled inwards towards the president’s large desk.

Troy and Dr. Snyder took their seats simultaneously. President Barber watched the two men sit in their seats, then took his own.

“First thing’s first, gentlemen,” began President Barber. “The issue today is the economy. Dr. Snyder, you have done a spectacular job eliminating the unemployment rate. Every single citizen is able to say that they have a job. However, and despite what we may say publicly, a large number of citizens are employed with near-meaningless occupations. We need to make every position meaningful and have depth at it in case a problem persists. We cannot have a glitch-problem when one worker goes down and the whole system collapses. Depth and efficiency is what I want; it’s what we need.”

“What types of jobs do you consider meaningless, Mr. President?” asked Dr. Snyder.

“I consider many jobs to be meaningless,” said President Barber, wide-eyed. “Including the defunct governmental system we have already eliminated; but that was and is not the only idle system of employment still in existence today. Company CEOs and executives of huge corporations do nothing but hold their money and reap the benefits of their workers’ intellect and sweat. Moreover, many of those in positions of power and money have no experience in the matter. They simply inherit the riches from a family member and become instant billionaires. With companies now larger than ever before, it would take an entire revamped and miserable effort to ruin an entire fortune. We’ve seen companies that seemed impregnable fold in a matter of months due to changes that unqualified peoples made in sad attempts to reform something that was not broke. That’s why we don’t see it very often. The executives sit back and are disengaged from the company. They’re afraid to make moves to change anything. Thus, the result is the rich getting richer and the workers propelling the company into the disengaged executives’ pockets.”