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We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles.
not the “news bullets” that purport to tell us all that we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches.
It’s always been much easier to make war than to make peace.
After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person’s whole life.
What I’d like to see is a state of the union where slavery isn’t being practiced.
Scientists in Australia have managed to bring a human infant to term in an artificial womb.
I wonder whether it will catch on at all in this world where so many poor women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers, carrying to term the child of wealthier people even when the wealthy people are able to have a child in the normal way. If you’re rich, you can have a surrogate for not much more than the price of feeding and housing her for nine months. If she’s smart and you’re generous, you might also wind up agreeing to feed, house, and help educate her children. And you might give her husband a job.
Consider, though: eggs combined with cloning technology (another toy of the rich) would give men the ability to have a child without the genetic or the gestational help of a woman. Such men would still need a woman’s ovum, stripped of its genetic contents, but that would be all. If the idea caught on, they might be willing to use the ovum of some animal species.
Her life had a way of changing in abrupt, important ways. I don’t suppose she was really any more prepared for sudden changes than anyone else, but her beliefs helped her cope with them, even take advantage of them when they came.
Any home or farm that can be seen from the highway is bound to be tempting to the desperate and the opportunistic, and now the fanatical.
Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious.
We still don’t know whose work this tongue cutting is, but we know that some Christian America types would be happy to silence all women. Jarret preached that woman was to be treasured, honored, and protected, but that for her own sake, she must be silent and obey the will of her husband, father, brother, or adult son since they understood the world as she did not.
The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved.
I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. But I would rather fix the problem.
lit
I don’t know.” He paused. “You can’t change everything in your life all at once. You just can’t.” “You can,” I said. “We both have. It hurts. It’s terrible. But you can do it.”
but I’d lived with Bankole long enough to know how nasty burns could be.
It was important to them that I had recovered from burns and gunshots. A lot of them had seen me back when I looked like vomit. They thought if I could recover from that, God must have something in mind for me.
Marcus sat still, staring into space. “I loved them,” he said, his voice soft and filled with pain.
Poor doesn’t matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected. I know that now, but I didn’t then.
“You walk the roads for a while, and you wonder if anyone is still human.”
His face changed in an odd way. “You. You personally.” He
“Religion is in our genes,” he said. “It must be. Either that or Dad did a hell of a job on us.” “We call our system Earthseed,” I said. “My actual title is ‘Shaper.’” He stared at me for several seconds, saying nothing. He still looked surprised, and now confused. “Earthseed?” he said at last. “My god, I’ve heard of you guys. You’re that cult!” “So we’ve been called.”
“I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true. I could never say anything about it at home.
You can’t own people and torture them for fun and profit without being shit. A pimp would sell his mother and his daughter if the price were right. And if I ever get the chance, I swear to god, Lauren, I’ll stake all three of them out and I’ll burn them—like Jarret’s people do with their so-called witches.”
If there are sins in Earthseed, shortsightedness, lack of forethought, is the worst of them. And yet shortsighted is exactly what she was. She sacrificed us for an idea.
I’ve begun to perceive color and texture, line and shape, light and shadow with new intensity. I go into these focused, trancelike states and draw really terrible stuff. My friends laugh at the drawings,
If you speak, you have to face questions and discussion.
“Okay, I can handle it.” No, I didn’t think he could. But an unpleasant thing should be done quickly if it must be done at all.
“Our God isn’t male. Change has no sex. Marc, you don’t know enough about us yet even to criticize us.”
“Why do you think your God doesn’t change? How can you prove it?” “I have faith that it’s true,” Marc said. “Belief must be based on faith as much as on proofs.”
“I think,” Marta Figueroa Castro said in her gentlest voice, “that the verses you read, Marc, mean that God is always God, always there for us, always dependable that way. And, of course, it means that God and God’s word will never die.”
He tried repairing salvaged tools, but it bothered him that he had so much to learn even about simple things.
“If you don’t know, ask,” Travis had shouted. “Nobody expects you to know everything. Just ask! This shit is easy to do if you just take the trouble to learn a few basics. Work with me for a while. Don’t try to go off on your own.”
couldn’t let him
To make peace with others, Make peace with yourself: Shape God With generosity And compassion. Minimize harm. Shield the weak. Treasure the innocent. Be true to the Destiny. Forgive your enemies. Forgive yourself.
My mother was quite open in her journal about the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing, and that this was a terrible frustration to her. She meant to make Earthseed a nationwide movement, but she had no idea how to do this.
It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.
He believes, he insists, that I coached people to attack and humiliate him at all three Gatherings. And he says with a weary, irritating, honest smile, “I forgive you. I might have done the same thing to protect my turf if I had any turf to protect.”
Still no anger expressed. Yet he was furious. He wouldn’t show it and he wouldn’t talk about it, but it came off him like heat. Perhaps that’s what a collar teaches—a horrible kind of self-control.
“As wind, As water, As fire, As life, God Is both creative and destructive, Demanding and yielding, Sculptor and clay. God Is Infinite Potential. God
People vanish in this world. Even rich people out for fun and greater profit vanish. It happens all the time.
We can, Each of us, Do the impossible As Long as we can convince ourselves That it has been done before.
“They should be small communities,” she said. “No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thousand should split and ‘parent’ a new community.”
Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Her bones, her husband’s, her children’s. After their deaths, Bankole must have felt cut off from the future, from any immortality of the flesh, the genes. He had no other relatives. Now he has a daughter. I’m not sure he even realizes how much of the time over the past couple of days that he’s been smiling.
We each stand ready to parent one another’s
I can often hear not only what he says but what he does not say. “I love you too,” I said, not quite smiling.
Problem was, we’d been focused for so long on immediate survival, on solving obvious problems, on business, on preparing for the near future. And I’ve worried about scaring people off with too many big plans.
“I don’t know that this country has ever had a leader as bad as Jarret or as bad as Jarret might turn out to be.
