The Lonely Lobbyist
It’s not every day a lobbyist gets to save the country, maybe even the world. That’s how the CEO of the power company convinced The Lobbyist to help him.

The power company had a revolutionary new technology that could generate electric energy out of something made by everything everywhere: sound. When it was up and running, a sound power generator would suck up all the sound for miles around and use that energy to create power. It was remarkably efficient, and it only had one problem: it removed all the sound from the environment, effectively making the surrounding communities deaf.

The Lobbyist could see how that might make it a really tough sell, and for a minute she thought about saying “No”. On the other hand, she still had hundreds of thousands of dollars she owed for her undergraduate education, and, as they say, money talks. Without even making a sound.

So The Lobbyist started out by running focus groups in small communities, explaining sound power and seeing whether there was any interest. People had to decide, Would it be worth it to give up on talking, on hearing noises, on listening to music, so that they could power everything from lightbulbs to cars just from all the noise in the environment?

Everybody said no. That’s when The Lobbyist realized how hard her fight was and how unpopular she was going to be if she kept working for sound power. But she knew how much sound power would help the country if people gave it a chance, and also how much her grateful client would pay her in bonus pay. She decided to stick with the program, even if it meant she would be the only one fighting for sound power.

The Lobbyist convinced her client that it was going to take a lot of money and some time to change things so that Americans were in favor of sound power. The CEO agreed, and he convinced the big banks to join the power company, investing in the most ambitious marketing campaign the country had ever seen. Over the next few election cycles, the power company started giving money to candidates who they knew would be pro-sound-power, and all that extra money gave these candidates such an advantage that they all were elected to Congress. Then the power company gave a ton of money to a Presidential candidate who they knew was on the side of sound power, and she won, too.

However, the new, pro-sound-power Congress couldn’t just create a new bill for the President to sign, legalizing sound power for the first time. The truth was, most people were still against sound power, and they were likely to vote the pro-sound-power politicians out of office if sound power became the law of the land. The Lobbyist still had work to do.

Funded by the power company and the big banks, The Lobbyist was able to blanket all the media with the pro-sound-power message. The message was the same one the CEO had given to The Lobbyist on the first day they met…

“Look at all the wars America gets into because regions with oil are so important to it. Look at all the petrodollars that go to countries that are hostile to us. Like Canada. Look at the terrible global warming that’s caused by all of our carbon emissions. We could end all that overnight, for the price of hearing. Isn’t it worth giving up your hearing in order to save humanity, get us out of wars in oil-rich areas, and, not-coincidentally, give our economy the biggest boost ever with the cheapest energy in the world?”

The campaign included a special jingle called, “Let This Be the Last Song You Hear”.

Meanwhile, things kept getting worse in the world: There were more wars in oil-rich regions, global warming intensified, and oil prices kept climbing, hurting the American economy. These events, aided by the fact that all the media kept repeating The Lobbyist’s message that sound power is the only solution, eventually changed the mind of most Americans. They finally allowed sound power legislation, and the power company was able to roll out sound power.

One by one, sound power plants came online all across the country. They worked exactly as predicted: They were extremely efficient at converting sound energy into electricity, and everything in America was converted into using electricity for power instead of hydrocarbons. All the coal plants were converted to sound power plants, and all drilling for hydrocarbons in America stopped. Air pollution became a thing of the past, and people across the world saw that, if they converted to sound power, the world would eventually be able to stop global warming.

Of course, Americans had to adjust to a life without hearing anything at all. Everybody learned sign language and learned to enjoy watching dance as much as they used to enjoy hearing music. And The Lobbyist was happy that she was able to do such a good job, make so much money, and save America.

On the day the last sound power plant went online, The Lobbyist had a last meeting with the CEO of the power company to review all the work she had done for them. During the meeting, she told the CEO a story about their first time they had met, that time when the CEO said it’s not every day a lobbyist gets to save the country, maybe even the world.

The Lobbyist said that, five minutes into that very first meeting, she had received an email from National Public Radio asking if she would be able to work for them to lobby for increased public funding, or at least not to have any more funding cut off. At that time, The Lobbyist loved NPR, and it was the kind of thing that she normally would have said “Yes” to, but, as it turned out, NPR was just a little too late; she was already hooked on the idea of sound power. She told the CEO about this, then added, “And none of this would have happened if you hadn’t arrived five minutes earlier!” This was all in sign language, of course.

— The End —