Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome.” Big shit. It hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco, the small pill, the Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I’m crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts.

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of. Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you’ll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?

In the book of Job, God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it. Okay. That works. That Old Testament God doesn’t violate the way things are now. But that God sounds a lot like Zeus—a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers.

Maybe God is a kind of big kid, playing with his toys. If he is, what difference does it make if 700 people get killed in a hurricane—or if seven kids go to church and get dipped in a big tank of expensive water?

Secretaries of Astronautics don’t have to know much about science. They have to know about politics.

“Bread and circuses,” my father says when there’s space news on the radio. “Politicians and big corporations get the bread, and we get the circuses.”

Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

They’re dead. They aren’t suffering, and if you didn’t like them when they were alive, why get so upset about their being dead? Cory gets upset. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

God is Power— Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change.

I’m not like Mrs. Sims. I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.

President William Turner Smith lost yesterday’s election. Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner is our new President—President-elect. So what are we in for? Donner has already said that as soon as possible after his inauguration next year, he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless, unnecessary” moon and Mars programs. Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized—sold off. Also, Donner has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend “overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board.

“Things are bad. My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.” “Normal,” I muttered. “I wonder what that is. Do you agree with your mother?” “No. Donner hasn’t got a chance. I think he would fix things if he could, but Harry says his ideas are scary. Harry says he’ll set the country back a hundred years.”

“But… couldn’t we just call the police?” “For what? We can’t afford their fees, and anyway, they’re not interested until after a crime has been committed. Even then, if you call them, they won’t show up for hours—maybe not for two or three days.” “I know.”

The world is in horrible shape. Even rich countries aren’t doing as well as history says rich countries used to do. President Donner isn’t the only one breaking up and selling off science and space projects. No one is expanding the kind of exploration that doesn’t earn an immediate profit, or at least promise big future profits.

The cops went nosing around the neighborhood, but no one else admitted knowing anything about a fight. After all, they knew Dad didn’t kill Keith. And they knew the cops liked to solve cases by “discovering” evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty. Best to give them nothing. They never helped when people called for help. They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse.

“She died for us,” the scavenger woman had said of the green face. Some kind of insane burn-the-rich movement, Keith had said. We’ve never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help-the-poor political statement?

“When were you born? What year?” “Twenty oh nine.”

ahh the nineties