Yesterday, our state Secretary of Health and Environment held a news conference with a child psychologist, on the topic of children’s mental health during the COVID-19 crisis, esp. anxiety. “We know anxiety is like the monster under the bed. It hides in the dark; it hides in the areas where we don’t talk about things . . . .”
That’s also the philosophy of Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of Parable of the Sower, the speculative-fiction work by Octavia Butler (which I am re-reading for the first time since 1993, when it came out). Lauren is fifteen years old when the story opens and is living with her family on a modest lower-middle-class cul-de-sac in a suburb of LA. The cul-de-sac has a wall around it, to keep out all the “desperate, crazy people” roaming around outside. Climate catastrophe has made water very expensive in southern California; and food prices keep going up and up. The drought and other extreme weather seem to have destroyed the economy; there aren’t very many paying jobs, and the neighbors grow or glean much of their own food. The police have been de-funded and are now funding themselves, by charging fees for (poor) service and occasionally engaging in theft. Outside the walls, lawlessness prevails; there are no government services for the non-rich; inside, the neighbors have started night patrols, in response to incursions by food thieves. To Lauren, it seems like only a matter of time before the desperate crazies return in numbers and breach their homemade walls. She’s reading her father’s books about native edible plants and firearms, and she’s put together what might now be called a “bug-out bag,” in case a rapid departure is called for. In other words, she’s a doomsday prepper. Most of all, she wants to get the others — children and adults — to see the danger she sees. But they are in denial; they don’t want to talk about it and scold her for doing so. It’s like there’s a fire in the kitchen, Lauren thinks, but everyone’s in the living room saying “the fire’s in the kitchen, not the living room; and anyway, it scares people to talk about fires.” But she rightly thinks that one must confront danger in order to prepare for it and deal with it. Her father wisely counsels that Lauren should try to teach people, not scare them — e.g., teach other kids about ways to survive off the land. This is good advice, of course; and since Lauren is responsible for teaching the very little kids in the neighborhood, she has a captive audience. With the adults, it might prove a little harder, because they naturally will inquire as to why they should be learning this stuff; learning to live off the land implies that you might need to know how to live off the land, and why would that be? (You can probably see where all this is trending, but no spoiler, I!) Can scaring people be a form of pedagogy? When I recommended the book to my dissertation director way back then, she said it was the scariest thing she ever read (she was raising a small child at the time), scary because believable. And scary things stay in your memory, even if you repress them. But does that knowledge, conscious or unconscious, lead to action? Or does it leave people paralyzed? These are questions I ask myself, as I (somewhat compulsively) record the progress of extreme weather around the world. It really is getting worse, statistically and anecdotally. But does it do any good to say so? It doesn't seem like governments and corporations are going to make the kind of dramatic changes it would take to arrest the deterioration of climate. And, while something as dramatic as a man being asphyxiated on camera will get thousands into the streets, monsoons in another continent or even a drought a couple of states over, not so much. So why not enjoy what's left of the Holocene? Why ruin the last years of normality preparing for what comes next? Who knows . . . it may be that things don't get much worse than they are now. Right? (. . . to be continued . . .)
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |