By Molly Liebergall ’17

The year is 2019. America is ravaged by chaos, and tomorrow, Jan. 20, marks the two-year anniversary of the beginning of the end.  Before she took office, Hillary Rodham Clinton beat Republican nominee Donald Trump by a narrow margin to snag the 2016 presidential election.

We were doomed the moment she raised her manicured, dainty right hand and took the Oath of Office.

It spread slowly at first, but sure enough, a cataclysmic neuropsychological disease pervaded our beloved American society.  It was not an airborne illness, nor was it contracted through physical touch or liquid contamination.  No, this deadly pathogen infected new patients through sight and hearing, and those with two X-chromosomes were especially susceptible.

Although no cure for the disease dubbed “Intelligentia Femina” has yet been discovered, the Center for Disease Control has urged the remaining population of healthy citizens, known as “Patriarchus,” to avoid watching or listening to President Clinton’s broadcasted speeches.  One independent study discovered that out of 12 people chosen randomly from a table of one dozen women at Starbucks, 100 percent of those auditorily and visually exposed to President Clinton’s influence showed signs of Intelligentia Femina just hours later.

The disease rapidly attacks the host’s perception of their own capabilities.  Some of the common symptoms are aggression in the workplace, delusions of equality and insomnia.  Insomnia had been found to mostly pertain to female college students and young adults who also suffer from the paranoid belief that gender could possibly prevent their accomplishments from rivaling those of competitors with Y-chromosomes.

These infected women spend sleepless nights maniacally working harder and longer than their male peers.  They are obsessed with answering every question professors ask, closing more deals than anyone else in their office and curing other diseases like cancer.

“If you ask me, these girls should be focusing on their own illness right now.  Let the professionals with normally sized brains handle cancer, kiddo,” neurologist Benjamin Tracey said with a wink.

And after so many nights spent awake and obsessive, it has started to take a toll on the appearance of these infected women.

“Boy do they look ugly the next day,” New York University student John Billington IV said while wiping Cheeto sdust on his sweatpants.  “One of ‘em was in my Economics 101 class, and this girl tried to wow us with this fancy shmancy presentation about the wage gap, but honestly all I noticed were the bags under her eyes.”

Billington paused for a moment to rip a bag of Doritos down the middle, ignoring the “Tear Here” imprinted in the corner above a small line of perforation.

“I mean, how am I supposed to focus on my work when there’s a freaking raccoon in my class,” he sputtered between mouthfuls.

Now, roughly 50 percent of the United States population suffers from Intelligentia Femina and its subsequent side-effects. The scariest part of this new world is not global warming or the fact that some Middle Eastern countries still impose restrictions on women’s attire; no, the most terrifying part is the widespread famine and general filth sweeping American homes as a result of maternal absence during working hours.  Oh, and I forgot to mention, this disease is hereditary.

For generations to come, infected patients with two X-chromosomes will pass down this strand of Intelligentia Femina to their offspring and to their offspring’s offspring and to their offspring’s offspring’s offspring.  You get the idea.

“It is most depressing to imagine a world where babies are born already infected, doomed to grow up actually thinking that they will have a shot at that big promotion or a chance of winning that Senate race or an opportunity to go to the moon,” philosophy professor Edward Benson remarked.

So, it is our job as surviving members of Patriarchus to let them down gently since there is only so much their smaller clumps of cerebral matter can comprehend.  And to think, all of this could have been avoided if we simply voted differently that fateful November.

This is what we get for allowing someone with a uterus, a reproductive organ we know less about than outer space, to reach the highest office in this country.

Dark days are upon us, my friends.  The America we once knew, in all of its former patriarchal glory, has been laid to waste by The Notorious HRC and the people she has infected, who had the temerity to demand that they be treated just like the rest of us.