The Fervor

by Alma Katsu

Whereas America was made up of so many different kinds of people, you’d think they’d have gotten used to each other by now.

How exhausting it must be here to hate everyone who was different.

made sense anymore, not when your government could lock you up without reason and your neighbors, people you thought were your friends, stood by and did nothing to stop them.

but they weren’t real military, they were men who liked to dress up in brown shirts and terrorize their neighbors.

America was not Nazi Germany. Rounding up citizens in camps in order to kill them: it was impossible. It went against everything America stood for—everything Americans said they stood for.

In that moment, he felt more a part of the community than he ever had as their minister. Hatred was a powerful common interest.

Were their lives so empty that they would believe anything? Tell them any stupid lie and they would swallow it like it was medicine and ask for more.

they forget that we answer to the American people, not just whoever sits behind the desk and gives the orders.

The fervor—that’s what she had begun to think of the disease as—had for its symptom the most powerful of contagious elements: fear. It seemed to spread from host to host faster than a spider could and caused violence and cruelty far deadlier than any weapon.

The playbook is the same, again and again. Lies, lies, and the willingness of a large part of a population to channel their fear into senseless hatred.