Dystopian Novel

Stunned. Shocked. Gutted. Blasted. Rocked. Pushed. Tossed. Angered. Flattened. Pressed.

Silenced.

There are no words. History is no longer history; we are living in a surreal social experiment replicating the most vicious and despicable acts perpetrated by the powerful on the powerless. There is no longer a need to argue that racism exists; it is alive, thriving, spreading like a fungus. Eat the mushroom and you too will believe that the systematic removal of human rights is the basis of democracy.

“I’m working with a child who is terrified her parents will be deported. What do I tell her?”

Tell her it will never happen, everything will be okay, as long as her family plays by the rules they’ll be taken care of. And don’t listen to all the hype. Stay positive. There is nothing to fear.

Which passage of Mein Kampf are you referring to? When you watched movies like Shindler’s List or Life is Beautiful, did you think the people in the fancy uniforms were the heroes?

 

Racism veiled as platitudes. Give me back my microaggressions. Unintentional acts imply the culprit would be amenable to asking for apology. Believing your own bullshit that says walling out entire religious and ethnic groups for “protection” is nearly a word-for-word iteration of racism. Protect who? Why? “I don’t hate them, I just don’t want them here.” Archie Bunker was a television character, a caricature of an ethos whose time had come, not an icon to be resurrected.

George Wallace was a villain. William Wallace was not. Make sure you know which Wallace you’re trying to emulate.

Naziism was not Hitler’s fault. Naziism lived because the people wanted it to. Because people of conscience, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, bought into a horrible, deliberately-crafted lie personifying the root of all their problems as Jews. And people who are gay. And people who weren’t Germans. And women who didn’t listen to men. And children who dared to read something other than the prescribed state literature.

All the leftover Aryans watched and listened as bodies were burned, shot, raped, tortured, shoveled like so much used-up coal. Some of the New World Order laughed. Some said it needed to be done for “public safety.” And some looked away, insisting loudly they were still good people with love in their hearts, because they had to blot out the whispers of the dying.

The required reading list should be everything written by Orwell. Throw in a little Wells, Huxley, Bradbury, Burgess, Nolan, McCarthy to name a few. Sprinkle in Thoreau for some light reading. Or just give us anything that looks like a book before the populace becomes illiterate and we have to teach reading in secret, in fear of being beaten for obtaining the forbidden knowledge.

Knowledge is power. Today it is also a commodity. Rome is being built in a day and in time we will be consigned to flames of woe. Enslavement means erasing the collective memory, replacing it with candy-colored fantasies of better times.

But we remember, and we scream, because the body never forgets the torture of the soul. Cry mercy, and unleash the dogs of war.