Vox

by Christina Dalcher

you can’t protest what you don’t see coming.

And that was how they did it. Sneaking in a course here, a club there. Anything to lure kids with promises of increasing their competitiveness. Such a simple thing, really.

“Well, yeah. It was there with the Greeks, the idea of public spheres and private spheres, but it goes back further. Think hunter-gatherer communities. Biologically, we’re suited to different things.” “We?” I said. “Men and women, Mom.” He stopped crunching and flexed his right arm. “See this? You could go to the gym every day for a year and you still won’t have muscle like I do.” He must have seen the look of pure disbelief on my face, because he reversed course. “I don’t mean you’re weak. Just different.”

He’s mad, he’s hurt, and he’s frustrated. None of this justifies the next words out of his mouth, though, the ones he will never be able to take back, the ones that slice deeper than any shard of broken glass and make me bleed all over. “You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk.”

Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, about how kids can turn into monsters, how they learn that killing is right and oppression is just, how in one single generation the world can change on its axis into a place that’s unrecognizable.

And birth control? That’s a good one. The pharmacy shelf that used to hold Trojan and Durex and LifeStyles boxes is stocked with baby food and diapers. A logical replacement.

Sleep is a fantastic eraser, as long as it lasts.