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Everywhere we look, trans people are under attack and dying, while cisgender people gloat and kill us.
United States of America is seeping with fascism, how the worlds in Octavia Butler’s books seem to have risen from the page to lurch through this reality.
accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.
Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”
WHOA.
Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again.
Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith’s supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret’s obvious tyranny.
Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her—or of anything. It is not conscious at all. “God is Change,” she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. “God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails.”
Praying does work. Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.”
Once he’s made everyone who isn’t like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn’t cause. That’s easier than trying to fix the problems.”
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
I must do this, or I will kill myself.
The problem with Earthseed has always been that it isn’t a very comforting belief system.
The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. I think about a little
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The fat crazy woman had been permitted to go about her business until someone resisted. Then both victim and victimizer were treated as equally guilty.
