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When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.”
“What could I say? That I believe in Earthseed, yet I doubt my own abilities? That I’m afraid all the time?” I sighed. “That’s where faith comes in, I guess. It always comes sooner or later into every belief system. In this case, it’s have faith and work your ass off. Have faith and work the asses off a hell of a lot of people. I realize all that, but I’m still afraid.”
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt.
And all of a sudden, I felt such shame. All I wanted to do was lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my uselessness and my aching breasts and scream and scream.
“You do what you’re told and only what you’re told,” he said. “You don’t touch one another. Whatever filth you’re used to, it’s over. It’s time for you to learn to behave like decent Christian women—if you’ve got the brains to learn.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so bad in every possible way, so horrible, so scared.
Submission was no protection. If any of us were to survive, we must escape these people as quickly as possible.
Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.
“Unto woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
In fact, they’ve only burned copies of the legal papers. I’m not sure that matters, but it’s true. Since we got our first truck, we’ve kept the originals in a safe-deposit box in Eureka—Bankole’s idea.
So how could a vigilante group have the nerve to set up a “reeducation” camp and run it with illegally collared people? We’ve been here for over a month and no one has noticed. Even our friends and customers don’t seem to have noticed.
to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion.
President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the intrusion of women into “men’s business.”
Being lashed hard several times is enough to induce temporary coordination problems and memory loss.
But somehow, it had not occurred to me that… that bits of my own mind could be snatched away too. I knew I could be killed. I’ve never had any illusions about that. I could be disabled. I knew that too. But I had not thought that another person, just by pushing a small button, then smiling and pushing it again and again…
My brother said a collar makes you envy the dead. As bad as that sounds, it didn’t, couldn’t, convey to me, how a collar makes you hate. It teaches you whole new magnitudes of utter hatred. I knew almost nothing about hate until this thing was put around my neck.
How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans?
It was never legal to collar non-criminals, never legal to confiscate their property or separate husband from wife or to force either to work without pay of some kind.
so that their children could be placed in good Christian America homes.
Yet Andrew Steele Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them. He didn’t get to do everything he wanted to do. He was capable of much greater fascism. So were his most avid followers.
People deserted or left the country to avoid the draft—there was one, at last—and the saying was, during the war, that healthy young men were America’s biggest export.
In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter.
But there was nothing at all said about rape.
Human decency is a sin here.
At last, though, our “teachers,” who are much more willing to inflict suffering than to endure it, drove us back to our prison rooms to sit in the cold dimness while they went to our cabins, to warm fires, light, and food.
Once I had my hands on one of them, I just shut my eyes and did it. I never felt their deaths. And I have never been so eager and so glad to kill people.
slowly
.
I dreamed of doing great, heroic things, but all I really tried to do was hide, vanish, make myself invisible.
Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ’s flock—or Jarret’s flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, my childhood was at least physically comfortable.
If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.
I could feel the howling straining to get out of my throat, the screams that came out as small, ragged cries, his and mine. I don’t know how long we sat together, holding one another, going mad inside ourselves, wailing and moaning for the dead and the lost, unable to contain for one more minute 17 months of humiliation and pain.
It amazes me that we were able to behave as sanely as we did.
Remembering wasn’t safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.
God is Change. I’ve taught that for six years. It’s true, and I suppose it’s paved the way for us now. Earthseed prepares you to live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want. But none of it is really easy.
It is to become new beings And to consider new questions.
Christian America had created whole new categories of sin and expanded old ones. We were not permitted pictures of any kind.
To get along with God Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Kindness eases Change.
I am alone, and I know that’s stupid. To travel alone is to make yourself more vulnerable than you need to be.
Walking, like writing, helps.
Beware: All too often, We say What we hear others say. We think What we’re told that we think. We see What we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see what we’re told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see Even an obvious lie Again And again and again May be to say it, Almost by reflex Then to defend it
I’ve always believed in the power of God, distant and profound. But more immediately, I believe in the power of religion itself as a great mover of masses.
But in post-Pox America, successful churches were only sources of influence. They offered people safe emotional catharsis, a sense of community, and ways to organize their desires, hopes, and fears into systems of ethics. Those things were important and necessary, but they weren’t power. If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn’t the little dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it.
He needed to feel useful, just as he needed someone to hear his outrageous stories.
All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.
I wrote about having four brothers and three sisters. The idea of eight children appealed to me. I didn’t think you could be lonely in such a big family.
The father was a big, godlike man who was rich and smart and… not there most of the time. I had the hardest time being him. Research didn’t help much. He was more of a shell than the others. What should a father be like inside, in his thoughts and feelings? I wasn’t sure.
I hit her before I even thought about it—and I discovered that I didn’t know my own strength. I broke her jaw. She was screaming and crying and bleeding, and I was horrified—scared to death.
My only good luck was that he was small, and after a while, I realized he was a little bit afraid of me. That was a shock. I had grown up timid and afraid of almost everyone—resentful, but afraid.
