Once more in the dystopian present

About six years ago, when I first finished the 400+ page fan fiction, I wrote a post about the pre-apocalyptic dystopian present, because even though I was working with a future situation and things were much worse, there were still too many things that seemed real.

That was totally appropriate; speculative fiction should tell us about ourselves. If that means it is often full of warnings, that is a reflection on ourselves. You could find that in the work of many authors. In the case of Octavia Butler, there were lots of warnings in Parable of the Sower, and it feels like we ignored the warnings for too long.

There is a changing climate, a rise of religious extremism, dangerous drug use that can lead to violence, and politicians campaigning on making America great again and picking fights with Canada. Some of those things are more from the sequel, Parable of the Talents, but they build upon each other in a reasonable way.

It is also not that surprising that the projections would seem familiar. When I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale I remember reading that there was no individual concept that hadn't happened somewhere. Putting them all together makes a work of fiction, but the fiction is working with facts.

It is not surprising that Butler could predict a future campaign slogan because a similar one was used in the past. On a related note, I recently learned that "Drain the swamp" came from Mussolini. It turns out that fascist authoritarianism doesn't require a lot of creativity.

In Sower, economic issues and growing violence were making it really hard for people to live and live safely, so there were companies recruiting families to go live in their communities as employees. They would have room and board, and maybe a salary if they were lucky. Yes, that sounds like at least serfdom or share-cropping if not outright slavery, but I was reading the book in February. In March I was reading about Miami-Dade county coming up with a plan to house teachers in the school because they couldn't afford area rents:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article206839799.html

I shouldn't have been surprised by it. I've heard many conservatives justify why there is no specific work that automatically deserves a living wage, regardless of whether it requires education or serves the public good, but does anyone really think this is good for teachers? When your place to live depends not merely on having some income, but on the entity you work for, how secure is anything?

Sower also had people who break into neighborhoods and kill the residents as a means of helping the poor, which sounds pretty alt-left, but I don't want to go over everything and what resonated. Really, there are just two points that I want to make.

One is that in the past when we projected into these scary scenarios - in books and movies and music videos - we always called it post-apocalyptic because we believed it would take some major disruption to bring us to this feral state. That no longer appears to be true. Slow, steady attacks on education, unions, news, and integration have been the most effective weapons, and shame on us for not seeing it.

The other thought is my frustration that it could be too late. I keep finding all of these methods that could be so good for building a better world, but they need to be built onto a functional world, not this dumpster fire we're creating. It's basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know; how can you move toward self-actualization when it's a struggle just to survive?

And it doesn't mean that I've quit trying or studying, but also there is rage, and mourning, and frustration, and maybe some stockpiling if I can manage it. But we keep choosing hate over beauty, and there is no good place for that to go.

Related post:
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/10/here-in-pre-apocalyptic-dystopian.html