SkunkyArt | RvBOMally

The PoD is Oswald being a worse shot, and missing Kennedy. Kennedy then commits far more to Vietnam, which extends the war throughout the rest of his presidency. He is remembered as the man who started the next Hundred Years' War.

The counterculture gets nasty. The civil rights movement becomes a full-on race war in the South when leaders on both sides are assassinated (MLK and George Wallace are assassinated within a week of one another). By the 1980s, tensions are so bad that all-out civil war breaks out. In an attempt to jettison the most chaotic bits of the country, the federal government allows California and "New Afrika" to go their own way.

The protests of 1968 become violent, and governments are overthrown in both the East and the West. While the Western governments retreat to Britain and Spain, the Soviets just send in the tanks and Moscow gets a few more SSRs. They get even more when the Chinese decide to attack in the 1980s, which ends in the People's Republic of China being transformed into the Worker's Republic of China, losing a few provinces and a hundred million people in the process. Europe's anarchist communes begin their decades-long war against one another.

Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism manage to succeed, and serve as a primary counter to the Western powers in Africa and the Middle East. The Indians get hit with a communist revolution. The Soviets capitalize on this, and support these movements.

The early 21st century is the era of greater federalization. As the African and Arab federations mature, other blocs start jumping on that bandwagon. The United States annexes Canada, and then its closest East Asian allies, to form closer ties with these states and to stand as a bulwark against communism. The Amerasians encourage the federalization of what remains of NATO. The Union of European Communes stabilizes under a strange pseudo-pagan socialist cult.

By the mid-21st century, just about everyone is a nasty dictatorship of one stripe or another. Amerasia is dominated by conservative forces which vow never to allow the Union to be jeopardized from within or without, and ruthlessly use the FBI to root out political dissidents while the Department of Culture ensures that everyone in the Union is a good, patriotic Amerasian. The Soviet Union has become a pseudo-fascist Slavic nationalist state, which is busy suppressing the peoples of Europe and Asia by playing musical chairs with national homelands and taking children from their homes to be Russified. That being said, inequality is bad and society has been in a state of disrepair for decades, with many city sectors closed off because they are just too full of crime. Radical political movements and cults love to recruit from the destitute, and are powerful and pervasive enough to constantly cause trouble without getting stamped out by "The Man."

Tech is amazing. There are already cities on the Moon, with self-sustaining bases on Mars. Space travel is widely available, with middle-class families easily affording annual trips to the Moon. Fusion power was unlocked in the 1980s, and so clean energy has been available for everyone and stopped a lot of atmospheric pollution in its tracks. Nukes have gone out of style, with defensive and offensive satellites replacing ICBMs. Energy shielding, phasers and photon torpedoes are standard for all military units, and just about everything that had wheels or tracks hovers now; drunk driving is a major problem with flying cars. Robots are widespread, from military bases to houses, although women in both East and West are still expected to stay in the kitchen; to be fair, nobody's figured out artificial intelligence, so robots need constant supervision. Most urban areas are starting to build "starscrapers," habitats propped up on antigravity-maintained spires, for the ultra-wealthy. Nobody wants to even see the chaos on the streets.