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I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas.
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.
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.”
Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.
Prescient
Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith’s supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret’s obvious tyranny.
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.
Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all.
“It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.”
Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.
Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression.
Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.
It’s always been much easier to make war than to make peace.
If they’re unlucky enough to be bad for business in some way—say they develop a taste for some of the company’s building materials—they’ll be lucky to survive at all. I doubt that Terrestrial environmental laws will protect them. Those laws don’t even really protect plant and animal species here on Earth. And who would enforce such laws on Mars?
Consider, though: a brand-new form of life has been discovered on Mars, and it got less time on the news disk than the runaway Texas boy. We’re becoming more and more isolated as a people.
Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as “witches,” and torch the churches and homes of people they don’t like.
It is no good to say that something is true because the Bible says it is true and then forget that a few pages later, the Bible says—or shows—something completely different.”
Jarret hates all this chaos the way I hate it. That’s why I voted for him. Now he’ll start putting things right!”
“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.”
In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another.
Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
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.”
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.
Trump
All possessions will be taken. They will strip us. They’ve made that all too clear. They will break us down, reshape us, teach us what it means to love their country and fear their God.
That would inhibit our reeducation.
They took Acorn. Its name is Camp Christian now.
It was against both local and federal law, so it shouldn’t have happened. Just as what’s happened to us now shouldn’t have happened.
When men have absolute power over women who are strangers, the men rape.
Ignorance Protects itself.
We must be reeducated. We must accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, Jarret’s Crusaders as our teachers, Jarret as God’s chosen restorer of America’s greatness, and the Church of Christian America as our church.
They eat better than we do, of course. After all, we owe them more than we can ever pay, you see, because they’re teaching us to forsake our sinful ways.
They’ve burned our books and our papers.
Do the police know? Are some of these “teachers” cops themselves or relatives of cops?
Pelican Bay State Prison, the thing had been called. It became Pelican Bay Christian Reeducation Camp.
This place is a university of pain.
Day quoted them Exodus 21:16—“And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” Day was lashed for his choice of scripture, of course, and he was told that the people of Christian America well knew that the devil could quote scripture.
Now I have been raped. It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.
These men feast on our pain—and they call us parasites.
They rape, but they pretend they don’t. They say they’re religious, but power has corrupted even the best of them.
She says she begged him to let her alone, and he threw her down and forced her. He said he was a loyal, hardworking Christian American, and he was entitled to some pleasure in his life. But when he had finished, he begged her to forgive him. Insanity.
To shape God, shape Self.
I guess it was just that they took her freedom.
Human decency is a sin here.
He’s out of his mind and our “teachers” weren’t able to lash him back to sanity, so they got rid of him.
In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.
My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can’t begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren’t.
The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, tend to be deeply religious and more than willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have. Their employers and their men abuse them. They bear more children than they can feed. They bear everyone’s contempt.
Camps are mentioned on the nets and disks as being strictly for the rehabilitation and reeducation of minor criminals—vagrants, thieves, addicts, and prostitutes. That’s all. No problem.
“Focus on what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it. Tell folksy stories that illustrate your points and promise the moon and stars—literally in your case. Why should people want to go to the stars, anyway? It will cost a lot of money, and time. It will force us to create whole new technologies.
Politicians, on the other hand, are short-term thinkers, opportunists, sometimes with consciences, but opportunists nevertheless.
