Vox

by Christina Dalcher

I’ve become a woman of few words.

Think about what you need to do to stay free. Well, doing more than fuck all might have been a good place to start.

One thing I learned from Jackie: you can’t protest what you don’t see coming.

I learned that once a plan is in place, everything can happen overnight.

If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes.

No one in the studio audience was paying attention to Jackie’s claims of skewed statistics, of the correlation-causation fallacy, of the fact that of course no one was taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in 1960, because they didn’t exist. That was how it started. Three women with a stack of pie charts and people like Olivia.

Mrs. McClellan, you have the right to remain silent— Okay. Lousy joke.

Patrick is the third type of man. He’s not a believer and he’s not a woman-hating asshole; he’s just weak. And I’d rather think about men who aren’t.

Of course, there aren’t any two-mommy or two-daddy families anymore; the children of same-sex partnerships have all been moved to live with their closest male relative—an uncle, a grandfather, an older brother—until the biological parent remarries in the proper way.

Funny, with all the talk before of conversion therapy and curing homosexuality, no one ever thought of the foolproof way of getting gays in line: take away their kids.

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.

No wonder the president agreed so quickly to my conditions; Morgan is an idiot who doesn’t know he’s an idiot. The worst kind.

Lin was wrong about the economy falling apart. It might not be thriving, but the machine chugs along at a constant, working speed. Our workforce wasn’t cut in half, only reassembled and redistributed. Men who performed unskilled labor were replaced with whoever the Pure deemed unworthy of hanging about in society. Industries—and that all-encompassing industry, government—cherry-picked freshly graduated males from the country’s top universities to fill the gaps women left: CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers.

Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb, artificial creations of madmen who, like the misguided Frankenstein, always think they know better.

And my fault didn’t start when I signed Morgan’s contract on Thursday. My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”