Homework answers / question archive / Parable of the Sower Week 2 Naomi Klein’s “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” ? In this chapter, Klein examines instances of “othering” and dehumanization that have occurred (and continue to occur) in colonial and imperial seizing of land and resources

Parable of the Sower Week 2 Naomi Klein’s “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” ? In this chapter, Klein examines instances of “othering” and dehumanization that have occurred (and continue to occur) in colonial and imperial seizing of land and resources

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Parable of the Sower Week 2 Naomi Klein’s “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” ? In this chapter, Klein examines instances of “othering” and dehumanization that have occurred (and continue to occur) in colonial and imperial seizing of land and resources. She argues that we are in the position we are in (with regards to climate change and environmental devastation) because of this ability to “other” or dehumanize others AND these tendencies of “othering” are exacerbated under conditions of climate change—where people leave their homes or need aid or resources because of natural disasters or wars fought over claim to land or natural resources. ? “Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in southern and East Africa.” (73). ” (68). ? Klein uses Edward Said’s discussion of “othering” which refers to: ”disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.” Klein argues that “once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction” (70). ? The kind of environmental degradation that we are now experiencing “would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools—of ranking the relative value of humans—are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with” (70). ? Examples of how this has played out in the U.S.: ? ”Think of the mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coal mining because so-called mountaintop removal coal mining is cheaper than digging holes underground. There must be theories of othering to justify sacrificing an entire geography— theories about the people who lived there being so poor and backward that their lives and culture don’t deserve protection. After all, if you’re a ‘hillbilly,’ who cares about your hills?” ? “Turning all that coal into electricity required another layer of othering, too, this time for the urban neighborhoods next door to the powerplants and refineries. In North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of color, black and Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers.”(70). ? Even attempts to ‘conserve’ land have kicked indigenous people off of and barred them from their traditional homelands. ? These are forms of violence that happen globally ? “boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanizing the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army.” (73). ? Klein is interested I how a “principle of respect for all human rights equally and the need for restorative justice” is relevant “in our times of eroding coastlines, of nations disappearing beneath rising seas, of the coral reefs that sustain entire cultures being bleached white, of a balmy Arctic” (69). ? Looking to ways of living differently: “Diagnoses that frame environmental destruction in terms of ‘human nature,’ on the inherent greed and shortsightedness of our species…erase the very existence of human systems that organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration. These systems existed and persist, against all odds, but they are erased every time we say that climate disruption is a crisis of ‘human nature.’” (71). Connection to Parable of the Sower ? The world of the novel is already experiencing the accelerated effects of climate change. But we can also see how it worsens the divides between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ The very wealthy are able to build walls and hire guards to protect their property. Rich corporations take advantage of poverty and corporatize towns (and turn inhabitants of towns into slaves). ? The effects of climate change have affected the poor, working class the worst, but we can see how it has even begun to have disastrous effects on the middle-class (Lauren’s community). ? Within the world of the novel, scarcity forces people to be extra defensive and to not trust people outside their own community. ? Lauren states “we need our paranoia to keep us alive” (180). “Let Them Drown” and Parable of the Sower ? At the same time, however, one thing that the novel pays attention to is how to build and sustain community during catastrophe—in the midst of crumbling conditions. ? We can see the way Lauren forms alliances; how those alliances are built on an ethic of shared survival. Lauren can’t save everyone, but she is generous with those she can create a sort of alliance with. She is generous with those people and cares for their future and survival. She sees her destiny as bound up with the future and survival of these other people. She invites these people to Bankole’s land—there is a generosity here even if it is limited. ? The novel offers interesting perspectives on how to sustain relationships and how to care for others even under conditions of scarcity. Scarcity often forces people into very defensive postures (protect yourself and your stuff or it will be taken from you), but there are other forms of solidarity and alliance that develop that aren’t as defensive. They work to build something else—another way of relating to each other and land and resources. Stakes ? What are stakes? ? Stakes are basically why something matters. Stakes are the implications of an issue/argument/text. Stakes help answer the question ”so what”? ? Stakes help us move from description/analysis to an argument that matters. ? In our own writing, stakes help our readers understand the implications of an argument that might not be readily apparent. It helps convince readers that ideas/arguments are important. ? What are examples of stakes? ? Connection to real-world examples ? Connection to other on-going conversations ? Actionable steps/what should happen because of the validity of this argument ? Make it clear who should care about this and why? ? ? ? Not all arguments are meant for all people—it may be more pressing/relevant for some people more than others. Articulating the stakes can help you direct your argument toward specific people. Synthesizing Klein with Parable of the Sower could be one way of thinking about the stakes of the text. It could allow us to think about implications of the narrative. How does it help us think differently about climate change and the forces that exacerbate climate change and also how the effects of climate change affect the calculus of life and death—the valuation of human life (who gets to live and who is forced to die)? ? In Parable of the Sower, there is little space for caring for others. Resources are so scarce that most people can only think about themselves, their families, and their small communities. ? But I think Lauren attempts to imagine community differently. She does not give up her defensive posture entirely (she is incredibly vigilant about protecting herself and her community), but she is more generous than she needs to be. She sees the way that her survival is dependent on the survival of a larger community—a community that can work together, can take care of themselves, and others. (Perhaps this stance is the result of Earthseed?) ? This is not a denial of scarcity, but it is a way of trying to build differently despite that scarcity. We could also connect this conversation to increasing scarcity because of Covid-19 (scarcity of supplies, vaccines, healthcare services, safe jobs, affordable housing). This scarcity is real, but we might think about how people have taken care of each other despite this scarcity. Emphasizing the Stakes of Your Own Writing: ? As you move toward your second position paper, identify a central issue you want to focus on, and try to think about the stakes of this issue. This doesn’t have to be a dominant part of your position paper, but it should be a major part of your Final Analysis Paper. Your position paper should gesture toward the stakes (even if you don’t fully unpack them). ? Your Position Paper should answer the question “so what”? ? Where can you establish the stakes in your writing? ? Could be established throughout your paper as you analyze evidence. ? Even if you discuss the stakes early on in your paper, it is often really effective to conclude your paper by emphasizing the stakes (could be a paragraph toward the end of your paper or a major part of the conclusion). ? I will be looking for and providing feedback on how you establish the stakes in your Position Paper #2 Homework ? Discussion Responses due Sunday by 11:59 pm ? For Wednesday by 10:30 am ? NO Free write due next week ? Finish Parable of the Sower ? Read Tananarive Due’s essay “The Only Lasting Truth” (read the entire thing, but focus on the parts that deal with Parable of the Sower) (pdf available on Canvas) ? Start brainstorming for Position Paper #2 Parable of the Sower The Parable Series (Book One) Octavia E. Butler Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 A Biography of Octavia E. Butler 2024 PRODIGY IS, AT ITS essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING by Lauren Oya Olamina 1 All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Saturday, July 20, 2024 I HAD MY RECURRING dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle—when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter. Today is our birthday—my fifteenth and my father’s fiftyfifth. Tomorrow, I’ll try to please him—him and the community and God. So last night, I dreamed a reminder that it’s all a lie. I think I need to write about the dream because this particular lie bothers me so much. I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very subtle image, but a persistent one. I’ve had many lessons, and I’m better at flying than I used to be. I trust my ability more now, but I’m still afraid. I can’t quite control my directions yet. I lean forward toward the doorway. It’s a doorway like the one between my room and the hall. It seems to be a long way from me, but I lean toward it. Holding my body stiff and tense, I let go of whatever I’m grasping, whatever has kept me from rising or falling so far. And I lean into the air, straining upward, not moving upward, but not quite falling down either. Then I do begin to move, as though to slide on the air drifting a few feet above the floor, caught between terror and joy. I drift toward the doorway. Cool, pale light glows from it. Then I slide a little to the right; and a little more. I can see that I’m going to miss the door and hit the wall beside it, but I can’t stop or turn. I drift away from the door, away from the cool glow into another light. The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness. Perhaps I awake a little. I do sometimes when the fire swallows me. That’s bad. When I wake up all the way, I can’t get back to sleep. I try, but I’ve never been able to. This time I don’t wake up all the way. I fade into the second part of the dream—the part that’s ordinary and real, the part that did happen years ago when I was little, though at the time it didn’t seem to matter. Darkness. Darkness brightening. Stars. Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light. “We couldn’t see so many stars when I was little,” my stepmother says to me. She speaks in Spanish, her own first language. She stands still and small, looking up at the broad sweep of the Milky Way. She and I have gone out after dark to take the washing down from the clothesline. The day has been hot, as usual, and we both like the cool darkness of early night. There’s no moon, but we can see very well. The sky is full of stars. The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal, perhaps about to spring, more threatening than protective. But my stepmother is there, and she isn’t afraid. I stay close to her. I’m seven years old. I look up at the stars and the deep, black sky. “Why couldn’t you see the stars?” I ask her. “Everyone can see them.” I speak in Spanish, too, as she’s taught me. It’s an intimacy somehow. “City lights,” she says. “Lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore.” She pauses. “When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars—the few stars we could see—were windows into heaven. Windows for God to look through to keep an eye on us. I believed her for almost a year.” My stepmother hands me an armload of my youngest brother’s diapers. I take them, walk back toward the house where she has left her big wicker laundry basket, and pile the diapers atop the rest of the clothes. The basket is full. I look to see that my stepmother is not watching me, then let myself fall backward onto the soft mound of stiff, clean clothes. For a moment, the fall is like floating. I lie there, looking up at the stars. I pick out some of the constellations and name the stars that make them up. I’ve learned them from an astronomy book that belonged to my father’s mother. I see the sudden light streak of a meteor flashing westward across the sky. I stare after it, hoping to see another. Then my stepmother calls me and I go back to her. “There are city lights now,” I say to her. “They don’t hide the stars.” She shakes her head. “There aren’t anywhere near as many as there were. Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be—and not that long ago.” “I’d rather have the stars,” I say. “The stars are free.” She shrugs. “I’d rather have the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But we can afford the stars.” 2 A gift of God May sear unready fingers. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Sunday, July 21, 2024 AT LEAST THREE YEARS ago, my fathers God stopped being my God. His church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because I’m a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn’t mine any more. My God has another name. We got up early this morning because we had to go across town to church. Most Sundays, Dad holds church services in our front rooms. He’s a Baptist minister, and even though not all of the people who live within our neighborhood walls are Baptists, those who feel the need to go to church are glad to come to us. That way they don’t have to risk going outside where things are so dangerous and crazy. It’s bad enough that some people—my father for one—have to go out to work at least once a week. None of us goes out to school any more. Adults get nervous about kids going outside. But today was special. For today, my father made arrangements with another minister—a friend of his who still had a real church building with a real baptistery. Dad once had a church just a few blocks outside our wall. He began it before there were so many walls. But after it had been slept in by the homeless, robbed, and vandalized several times, someone poured gasoline in and around it and burned it down. Seven of the homeless people sleeping inside on that last night burned with it. But somehow, Dad’s friend Reverend Robinson has managed to keep his church from being destroyed. We rode our bikes to it this morning—me, two of my brothers, four other neighborhood kids who were ready to be baptized, plus my father and some other neighborhood adults riding shotgun. All the adults were armed. That’s the rule. Go out in a bunch, and go armed. The alternative was to be baptized in the bathtub at home. That would have been cheaper and safer and fine with me. I said so, but no one paid attention to me. To the adults, going outside to a real church was like stepping back into the good old days when there were churches all over the place and too many lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks instead of for torching things. They never miss a chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and good times come back. Yeah. To us kids—most of us—the trip was just an adventure, an excuse to go outside the wall. We would be baptized out of duty or as a kind of insurance, but most of us aren’t that much concerned with religion. I am, but then I have a different religion. “Why take chances,” Silvia Dunn said to me a few days ago. “Maybe there’s something to all this religion stuff.” Her parents thought there was, so she was with us. My brother Keith who was also with us didn’t share any of my beliefs. He just didn’t care. Dad wanted him to be baptized, so what the hell. There wasn’t much that Keith did care about. He liked to hang out with his friends and pretend to be grown up, dodge work and dodge school and dodge church. He’s only twelve, the oldest of my three brothers. I don’t like him much, but he’s my stepmother’s favorite. Three smart sons and one dumb one, and it’s the dumb one she loves best. Keith looked around more than anyone as we rode. His ambition, if you could call it that, is to get out of the neighborhood and go to Los Angeles. He’s never too clear about what he’ll do there. He just wants to go to the big city and make big money. According to my father, the big city is a carcass covered with too many maggots. I think he’s right, though not all the maggots are in LA. They’re here, too. But maggots tend not to be early-morning types. We rode past people stretched out, sleeping on the sidewalks, and a few just waking up, but they paid no attention to us. I saw at least three people who weren’t going to wake up again, ever. One of them was headless. I caught myself looking around for the head. After that, I tired not to look around at all. A woman, young, naked, and filthy stumbled along past us. I got a look at her slack expression and realized that she was dazed or drunk or something. Maybe she had been raped so much that she was crazy. I’d heard stories of that happening. Or maybe she was just high on drugs. The boys in our group almost fell off their bikes, staring at her. What wonderful religious thoughts they would be having for a while. The naked woman never looked at us. I glanced back after we’d passed her and saw that she had settled down in the weeds against someone else’s neighborhood wall. A lot of our ride was along one neighborhood wall after another; some a block long, some two blocks, some five. … Up toward the hills there were walled estates—one big house and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants lived. We didn’t pass anything like that today. In fact we passed a couple of neighborhoods so poor that their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were trashed—burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies or squatted-in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children. Their kids were wide awake and watching us this morning. I feel sorry for the little ones, but the ones my age and older make me nervous. We ride down the middle of the cracked street, and the kids come out and stand along the curb to stare at us. They just stand and stare. I think if there were only one or two of us, or if they couldn’t see our guns, they might try to pull us down and steal our bikes, our clothes, our shoes, whatever. Then what? Rape? Murder? We could wind up like that naked woman, stumbling along, dazed, maybe hurt, sure to attract dangerous attention unless she could steal some clothing. I wish we could have given her something. My stepmother says she and my father stopped to help an injured woman once, and the guys who had injured her jumped out from behind a wall and almost killed them. And we’re in Robledo—20 miles from Los Angeles, and, according to Dad, once a rich, green, unwalled little city that he had been eager to abandon when he was a young man. Like Keith, he had wanted to escape the dullness of Robledo for big city excitement. L.A. was better then—less lethal. He lived there for 21 years. Then in 2010, his parents were murdered and he inherited their house. Whoever killed them had robbed the house and smashed up the furniture, but they didn’t torch anything. There was no neighborhood wall back then. Crazy to live without a wall to protect you. Even in Robledo, most of the street poor—squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general—are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous. Worse for me, they often have things wrong with them. They cut off each other’s ears, arms, legs. … They carry untreated diseases and festering wounds. They have no money to spend on water to wash with so even the unwounded have sores. They don’t get enough to eat so they’re malnourished—or they eat bad food and poison themselves. As I rode, I tried not to look around at them, but I couldn’t help seeing—collecting—some of their general misery. I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I’ve had to learn to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep peddling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse. My father glanced back at me every now and then. He tells me, “You can beat this thing. You don’t have to give in to it.” He has always pretended, or perhaps believed, that my hyperempathy syndrome was something I could shake off and forget about. The sharing isn’t real, after all. It isn’t some magic or ESP that allows me to share the pain or the pleasure of other people. It’s delusional. Even I admit that. My brother Keith used to pretend to be hurt just to trick me into sharing his supposed pain. Once he used red ink as fake blood to make me bleed. I was eleven then, and I still bled through the skin when I saw someone else bleeding. I couldn’t help doing it, and I always worried that it would give me away to people outside the family. I haven’t shared bleeding with anyone since I was twelve and got my first period. What a relief that was. I just wish all the rest of it had gone away, too. Keith only tricked me into bleeding that once, and I beat the hell out of him for it. I didn’t fight much when I was little because it hurt me so. I felt every blow that I struck, just as though I’d hit myself. So when I did decide that I had to fight, I set out to hurt the other kid more than kids usually hurt one another. I broke Michael Talcott’s arm and Rubin Quintanilla’s nose. I knocked out four of Silvia Dunn’s teeth. They all earned what I did to them two or three times over. I got punished every time, and I resented it. It was double punishment, after all, and my father and stepmother knew it. But knowing didn’t stop them. I think they did it to satisfy the other kids’ parents. But when I beat up Keith, I knew that Cory or Dad or both of them would punish me for it—my poor little brother, after all. So I had to see that my poor little brother paid in advance. What I did to him had to be worthwhile in spite of what they would do to me. It was. We both got it later from Dad—me for hurting a younger kid and Keith for risking putting “family business” into the street. Dad is big on privacy and “family business.” There’s a whole range of things we never even hint about outside the family. First among these is anything about my mother, my hyperempathy, and how the two are connected. To my father, the whole business is shameful. He’s a preacher and a professor and a dean. A first wife who was a drug addict and a daughter who is drug damaged is not something he wants to boast about. Lucky for me. Being the most vulnerable person I know is damned sure not something I want to boast about. I can’t do a thing about my hyperempathy, no matter what Dad thinks or wants or wishes. I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome.” Big shit. It hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco, the small pill, the Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I’m crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts. I’m supposed to share pleasure and pain, but there isn’t much pleasure around these days. About the only pleasure I’ve found that I enjoy sharing is sex. I get the guy’s good feeling and my own. I almost wish I didn’t. I live in a tiny, walled fish-bowl cul-de-sac community, and I’m the preacher’s daughter. There’s a real limit to what I can do as far as sex goes. Anyway, my neurotransmitters are scrambled and they’re going to stay scrambled. But I can do okay as long as other people don’t know about me. Inside our neighborhood walls I do fine. Our rides today, though, were hell. Going and coming, they were all the worst things I’ve ever felt—shadows and ghosts, twists and jabs of unexpected pain. If I don’t look too long at old injuries, they don’t hurt me too much. There was a naked little boy whose skin was a mass of big red sores; a man with a huge scab over the stump where his right hand used to be; a little girl, naked, maybe seven years old with blood running down her bare thighs. A woman with a swollen, bloody, beaten face. … I must have seemed jumpy. I glanced around like a bird, not letting my gaze rest on anyone longer than it took me to see that they weren’t coming in my direction or aiming anything at me. Dad may have read something of what I was feeling in my expression. I try not to let my face show anything, but he’s good at reading me. Sometimes people say I look grim or angry. Better to have them think that than know the truth. Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me. Dad had insisted on fresh, clean, potable water for the baptism. He couldn’t afford it, of course. Who could? That was the other reason for the four extra kids: Silvia Dunn, Hector Quintanilla, Curtis Talcott, and Drew Baiter, along with my brothers Keith and Marcus. The other kids’ parents had helped with costs. They thought a proper baptism was important enough to spend some money and take some risks. I was the oldest by about two months. Curtis was next. As much as I hated being there, I hated even more that Curtis was there. I care about him more than I want to. I care what he thinks of me. I worry that I’ll fall apart in public some day and he’ll see. But not today. By the time we reached the fortress-church, my jaw-muscles hurt from clinching and unclinching my teeth, and overall, I was exhausted. There were only five or six dozen people at the service—enough to fill up our front rooms at home and look like a big crowd. At the church, though, with its surrounding wall and its security bars and Lazor wire and its huge hollowness inside, and it’s armed guards, the crowd seemed a tiny scattering of people. That was all right. The last thing I wanted was a big audience to maybe trip me up with pain. The baptism went just as planned. They sent us kids off to the bathrooms (“men’s,” “women’s,” “please do not put paper of any kind into toilets,” “water for washing in bucket at left. …”) to undress and put on white gowns. When we were ready, Curtis’s father took us to an anteroom where we could hear the preaching—from the first chapter of Saint John and the second chapter of The Acts—and wait our turns. My turn came last. I assume that was my father’s idea. First the neighbor kids, then my brothers, then me. For reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to me, Dad thinks I need more humility. I think my particular biological humility— or humiliation—is more than enough. What the hell? Someone had to be last. I just wish I could have been courageous enough to skip the thing altogether. So, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. …” Catholics get this stuff over with when they’re babies. I wish Baptists did. I almost wish I could believe it was important the way a lot of people seem to, the way my father seems to. Failing that, I wish I didn’t care. But I do. The idea of God is much on my mind these days. I’ve been paying attention to what other people believe—whether they believe, and if so what kind of God they believe in. Keith says God is just the adults’ way of trying to scare you into doing what they want. He doesn’t say that around Dad, but he says it. He believes in what he sees, and no matter what’s in front of him, he doesn’t see much. I suppose Dad would say that about me if he knew what I believe. Maybe he’d be right. But it wouldn’t stop me from seeing what I see. A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of. Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you’ll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected? There’s a big, early-season storm blowing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s bounced around the Gulf, killing people from Florida to Texas and down into Mexico. There are over 700 known dead so far. One hurricane. And how many people has it hurt? How many are going to starve later because of destroyed crops? That’s nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don’t hear the warnings until it’s too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where’s safety for them anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? We’re almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we’ll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have. How will God—my father’s God— behave toward us when we’re poor? Is there a God? If there is, does he (she? it?) care about us? Deists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson believed God was something that made us, then left us on our own. “Misguided,” Dad said when I asked him about Deists. “They should have had more faith in what their Bibles told them.” I wonder if the people on the Gulf Coast still have faith. People have had faith through horrible disasters before. I read a lot about that kind of thing. I read a lot period. My favorite book of the Bible is Job. I think it says more about my father’s God in particular and gods in general than anything else I’ve ever read. In the book of Job, God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it. Okay. That works. That Old Testament God doesn’t violate the way things are now. But that God sounds a lot like Zeus—a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers. Bang, bang! Seven toys fall dead. If they’re yours, you make the rules. Who cares what the toys think. Wipe out a toy’s family, then give it a brand new family. Toy children, like Job’s children, are interchangeable. Maybe God is a kind of big kid, playing with his toys. If he is, what difference does it make if 700 people get killed in a hurricane—or if seven kids go to church and get dipped in a big tank of expensive water? But what if all that is wrong? What if God is something else altogether? 3 We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end, we yield to God. We adapt and endure, For we are Earthseed And God is Change. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Tuesday, July 30, 2024 ONE OF THE ASTRONAUTS on the latest Mars mission has been killed. Something went wrong with her protective suit and the rest of her team couldn’t get her back to the shelter in time to save her. People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter. The cost of water has gone up again. And I heard on the news today that more water peddlers are being killed. Peddlers sell water to squatters and the street poor—and to people who’ve managed to hold on to their homes, but not to pay their utility bills. Peddlers are being found with their throats cut and their money and their handtrucks stolen. Dad says water now costs several times as much as gasoline. But, except for arsonists and the rich, most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic. It’s a lot harder to give up water. Fashion helps. You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are. Among the younger kids, being clean is a great way to start a fight. Cory won’t let us stay dirty here in the neighborhood, but we all have filthy clothes to wear outside the walls. Even inside, my brothers throw dirt on themselves as soon as they get away from the house. It’s better than getting beaten up all the time. Tonight the last big Window Wall television in the neighborhood went dark for good. We saw the dead astronaut with all of red, rocky Mars around her. We saw a dust-dry reservoir and three dead water peddlers with their dirty-blue armbands and their heads cut halfway off. And we saw whole blocks of boarded up buildings burning in Los Angeles. Of course, no one would waste water trying to put such fires out. Then the Window went dark. The sound had flickered up and down for months, but the picture was always as promised—like looking through a vast, open window. The Yannis family has made a business of having people in to look through their Window. Dad says that kind of unlicensed business isn’t legal, but he let us go to watch sometimes because he didn’t see any harm in it, and it helped the Yannises. A lot of small businesses are illegal, even though they don’t hurt anyone, and they keep a household or two alive. The Yannis Window is about as old as I am. It covers the long west wall of their living room. They must have had plenty of money back when they bought it. For the past couple of years, though, they’ve been charging admission—only letting in people from the neighborhood—and selling fruit, fruit juice, acorn bread, or walnuts. Whatever they had too much of in their garden, they found a way to sell. They showed movies from their library and let us watch news and whatever else was broadcast. They couldn’t afford to subscribe to any of the new multisensory stuff, and their old Window couldn’t have received most of it, anyway. They have no reality vests, no touch-rings, and no headsets. Their setup was just a plain, thin-screened Window. All we have left now are three small, ancient, murky little TV sets scattered around the neighborhood, a couple of computers used for work, and radios. Every household still has at least one working radio. A lot of our everyday news is from radio. I wonder what Mrs. Yannis will do now. Her two sisters have moved in with her, and they’re working so maybe it will be all right. One is a pharmacist and the other is a nurse. They don’t earn much, but Mrs. Yannis owns the house free and clear. It was her parents’ house. All three sisters are widows and between them they have twelve kids, all younger than I am. Two years ago, Mr. Yannis, a dentist, was killed while riding his electric cycle home from the walled, guarded clinic where he worked. Mrs. Yannis says he was caught in a crossfire, hit from two directions, then shot once more at close range. His bike was stolen. The police investigated, collected their fee, and couldn’t find a thing. People get killed like that all the time. Unless it happens in front of a police station, there are never any witnesses. Saturday, August 3, 2024 The dead astronaut is going to be brought back to Earth. She wanted to be buried on Mars. She said that when she realized she was dying. She said Mars was the one thing she had wanted all her life, and now she would be part of it forever. But the Secretary of Astronautics says no. He says her body might be a contaminant. Idiot. Can he believe that any microorganism living in or on her body would have a prayer of surviving and going native in that cold, thin, lethal ghost of an atmosphere? Maybe he can. Secretaries of Astronautics don’t have to know much about science. They have to know about politics. Theirs is the youngest Cabinet department, and already it’s fighting for its life. Christopher Morpeth Donner, one of the men running for President this year, has promised to abolish it if he’s elected. My father agrees with Donner. “Bread and circuses,” my father says when there’s space news on the radio. “Politicians and big corporations get the bread, and we get the circuses.” “Space could be our future,” I say. I believe that. As far as I’m concerned, space exploration and colonization are among the few things left over from the last century that can help us more than they hurt us. It’s hard to get anyone to see that, though, when there’s so much suffering going on just outside our walls. Dad just looks at me and shakes his head. “You don’t understand,” he says. “You don’t have any idea what a criminal waste of time and money that socalled space program is.” He’s going to vote for Donner. He’s the only person I know who’s going to vote at all. Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember. That’s what the space program is about these days, at least for politicians. Hey, we can run a space station, a station on the moon, and soon, a colony on Mars. That proves we’re still a great, forward-looking, powerful nation, right? Yeah. Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet. And I’m sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven. Her name was Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal. She was a chemist. I intend to remember her. I think she can be a kind of model for me. She spent her life heading for Mars—preparing herself, becoming an astronaut, getting on a Mars crew, going to Mars, beginning to figure out how to terraform Mars, beginning to create sheltered places where people can live and work now. … Mars is a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth. Monday, August 12, 2024 Mrs. Sims shot herself today—or rather, she shot herself a few days ago, and Cory and Dad found her today. Cory went a little crazy for a while afterward. Poor, sanctimonious, old Mrs. Sims. She used to sit in our front-room church every Sunday, large-print Bible in hand, and shout out her responses: “Yes, Lord!” “Hallelujah!” “Thank you, Jesus!” “Amen!” During the rest of the week she sewed, made baskets, took care of her garden, sold what she could from it, took care of pre-school children, and talked about everyone who wasn’t as holy as she thought she was. She was the only person I’ve ever known who lived alone. She had a whole big house to herself because she and the wife of her only son hated each other. Her son and his family were poor, but they wouldn’t live with her. Too bad. Different people frightened her in some deep, hard, ugly way. She didn’t like the Hsu family because they were Chinese and Hispanic, and the older Chinese generation is still Buddhist. She’s lived a couple of doors up from them for longer than I’ve been alive, but they were still from Saturn as far as she was concerned. “Idolaters,” she would call them if none of them were around. At least she cared enough about neighborly relations to do her talking about them behind their backs. They brought her peaches and figs and a length of good cotton cloth last month when she was robbed. That robbery was Mrs. Sims’s first major tragedy. Three men climbed over the neighborhood wall, cutting through the strands of barbed wire and Lazor wire on top. Lazor wire is terrible stuff. It’s so fine and sharp that it slices into the wings or feet of birds who either don’t see it or see it and try to settle on it. People, though, can always find a way over, under, or through. Everyone brought Mrs. Sims things after the robbery, in spite of the way she is. Was. Food, clothing, money. … We took up collections for her at church. The thieves had tied her up and left her—after one of them raped her. An old lady like that! They grabbed all her food, her jewelry that had once belonged to her mother, her clothes, and worse of all, her supply of cash. It turns out she kept that—all of it—in a blue plastic mixing bowl high up in her kitchen cabinet. Poor, crazy old lady. She came to my father, crying and carrying on after the robbery because now she couldn’t buy the extra food she needed to supplement what she grew. She couldn’t pay her utility bills or her upcoming property taxes. She would be thrown out of her house into the street! She would starve! Dad told her over and over that the church would never let that happen, but she didn’t believe him. She talked on and on about having to be a beggar now, while Dad and Cory tried to reassure her. The funny thing is, she didn’t like us either because Dad had gone and married “that Mexican woman Cory-ah-zan.” It just isn’t that hard to say “Corazon” if that’s what you choose to call her. Most people just call her Cory or Mrs. Olamina. Cory never let on that she was offended. She and Mrs. Sims were sugary sweet to one another. A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace. Last week Mrs. Sims’s son, his five kids, his wife, her brother, and her brother’s three kids all died in a house fire—an arson fire. The son’s house had been in an unwalled area north and east of us, closer to the foothills. It wasn’t a bad area, but it was poor. Naked. One night someone torched the house. Maybe it was a vengeance fire set by some enemy of a family member or maybe some crazy just set it for fun. I’ve heard there’s a new illegal drug that makes people want to set fires. Anyway, no one knows who did it to the Sims/Boyer families. No one saw anything, of course. And no one got out of the house. Odd, that. Eleven people, and no one got out. So about three days ago, Mrs. Sims shot herself. Dad said he’d heard from the cops that it was about three days ago. That would have been just two days after she heard about her son’s death. Dad went to see her this morning because she missed church yesterday. Cory forced herself to go along because she thought she should. I wish she hadn’t. To me, dead bodies are disgusting. They stink, and if they’re old enough, there are maggots. But what the hell? They’re dead. They aren’t suffering, and if you didn’t like them when they were alive, why get so upset about their being dead? Cory gets upset. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead. I began writing this about Mrs. Sims because she killed herself. That’s what’s upset me. She believed, like Dad, that if you kill yourself, you go to hell and burn forever. She believed in a literal acceptance of everything in the Bible. Yet, when things got to be too much for her, she decided to trade pain for eternal pain in the hereafter. How could she do that? Did she really believe in anything at all? Was it all hypocrisy? Or maybe she just went crazy because her God was demanding too much of her. She was no Job. In real life, how many people are? Saturday, August 17, 2024 I can’t get Mrs. Sims out of my mind. Somehow, she and her suicide have gotten tangled up with the astronaut and her death and her expulsion from heaven. I need to write about what I believe. I need to begin to put together the scattered verses that I’ve been writing about God since I was twelve. Most of them aren’t much good. They say what I need to say, but they don’t say it very well. A few are the way they should be. They press on me, too, like the two deaths. I try to hide in all the work there is to do here for the household, for my father’s church, and for the school Cory keeps to teach the neighborhood kids. The truth is, I don’t care about any of those things, but they keep me busy and make me tired, and most of the time, I sleep without dreaming. And Dad beams when people tell him how smart and industrious I am. I love him. He’s the best person I know, and I care what he thinks. I wish I didn’t, but I do. For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right—just the way it has to be. In the past year, it’s gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to: God is Power— Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth. God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails. But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent. That’s what I know. That’s some of it anyway. I’m not like Mrs. Sims. I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is. Maybe I’ll be more like Alicia Leal, the astronaut. Like her, I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need. I don’t have all of it yet. I don’t even know how to pass on what I do have. I’ve got to learn to do that. It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them? Is any of this real? Dangerous question. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. I doubt myself. I doubt what I think I know. I try to forget about it. After all, if it’s real, why doesn’t anyone else know about it. Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it. We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people—super-parents, super-kings and queens, supercops—to be our gods and to look after us—to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba—or like a cancer. Chaos. Even so, why can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world. But this thing (This idea? Philosophy? New religion?) won’t let me alone, won’t let me forget it, won’t let me go. Maybe. … Maybe it’s like my sharing: One more weirdness; one more crazy, deep-rooted delusion that I’m stuck with. I am stuck with it. And in time, I’ll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I’ll have to do something about it. That reality scares me to death. Wednesday, November 6, 2024 President William Turner Smith lost yesterdays election. Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner is our new President—President-elect. So what are we in for? Donner has already said that as soon as possible after his inauguration next year, he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless, unnecessary” moon and Mars programs. Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized—sold off. Also, Donner has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend “overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board. What’s adequate, I wonder: A house or apartment? A room? A bed in a shared room? A barracks bed? Space on a floor? Space on the ground? And what about people with big families? Won’t they be seen as bad investments? Won’t it make much more sense for companies to hire single people, childless couples, or, at most, people with only one or two kids? I wonder. And what about those suspended laws? Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people—as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die? Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach. 2025 INTELLIGENCE IS ONGOING, INDIVIDUAL adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING 4 A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Saturday, February 1, 2025 WE HAD A FIRE today. People worry so much about fire, but the little kids will play with it if they can. We were lucky with this fire. Amy Dunn, three years old, managed to start it in her family’s garage. Once the fire began to crawl up the wall, Amy got scared and ran into the house. She knew she had done something bad, so she didn’t tell anyone. She hid under her grandmother’s bed. Out back, the dry wood of the garage burned fast and hot. Robin Baiter saw the smoke and rang the emergency bell on the island in our street. Robin’s only ten, but she’s a bright little kid—one of my stepmother’s star students. She keeps her head. If she hadn’t alerted people as soon as she saw the smoke, the fire could have spread. I heard the bell and ran out like everyone else to see what was wrong. The Dunns live across the street from us, so I couldn’t miss the smoke. The fire plan worked the way it was supposed to. The adult men and women put the fire out with garden hoses, shovels, wet towels and blankets. Those without hoses beat at the edges of the fire and smothered them with dirt. Kids my age helped out where we were needed and put out any new fires started by flying embers. We brought buckets to fill with water, and shovels, blankets, and towels of our own. There were a lot of us, and we kept our eyes open. The very old people watched the little kids and kept them out of the way and out of trouble. No one missed Amy. No one had seen her in the Dunn back yard, so no one thought about her. Her grandmother found her much later and got the truth out of her. The garage was a total loss. Edwin Dunn salvaged some of his garden and carpentry equipment, but not much. The grapefruit tree next to the garage and the two peach trees behind it were half-burned, too, but they might survive. The carrot, squash, collard, and potato plants were a trampled mess. Of course, no one called the fire department. No one would take on fire service fees just to save an unoccupied garage. Most of our households couldn’t afford another big bill, anyway. The water wasted on putting out the fire was going to be hard enough to pay for. What will happen, I wonder, to poor little Amy Dunn. No one cares about her. Her family feeds her and, now and then, cleans her up, but they don’t love her or even like her. Her mother Tracy is only a year older than I am. She was 13 when Amy was born. She was 12 when her 27-year-old uncle who had been raping her for years managed to make her pregnant. Problem: Uncle Derek was a big, blond, handsome guy, funny and bright and well-liked. Tracy was, is, dull and homely, sulky and dirty-looking. Even when she’s clean, she looks splotchy, dirty. Some of her problems might have come from being raped by Uncle Derek for years. Uncle Derek was Tracy’s mother’s youngest brother, her favorite brother, but when people realized what he had been doing, the neighborhood men got together and suggested he go live somewhere else. People didn’t want him around their daughters. Irrational as usual, Tracy’s mother blamed Tracy for his exile, and for her own embarrassment. Not many girls in the neighborhood have babies before they drag some boy to my father and have him unite them in holy matrimony. But there was no one to marry Tracy, and no money for prenatal care or an abortion. And poor Amy, as she grew, looked more and more like Tracy: scrawny and splotchy with sparse, stringy hair. I don’t think she’ll ever be pretty. Tracy’s maternal instincts didn’t kick in, and I doubt that her mother Christmas Dunn has any. The Dunn family has a reputation for craziness. There are sixteen of them living in the Dunn house, and at least a third are nuts. Amy isn’t crazy, though. Not yet. She’s neglected and lonely, and like any little kid left on her own too much, she finds ways to amuse herself. I’ve never seen anyone hit Amy or curse her or anything like that. The Dunns do care what people think of them. But no one pays any attention to her, either. She spends most of her time playing alone in the dirt. She also eats the dirt and whatever she finds in it, including bugs. But not long ago, just out of curiosity, I took her to our house, sponged her off, taught her the alphabet, and showed her how to write her name. She loved it. She’s got a hungry, able little mind, and she loves attention. Tonight I asked Cory if Amy could start school early. Cory doesn’t take kids until they’re five or close to five, but she said she’d let Amy in if I would take charge of her. I expected that, though I don’t like it. I help with the five and six year olds, anyway. I’ve been taking care of little kids since I was one, and I’m tired of it. I think, though, that if someone doesn’t help Amy now, someday she’ll do something a lot worse than burning down her family’s garage. Wednesday, February 19, 2025 Some cousins of old Mrs. Sims have inherited her house. They’re lucky there’s still a house to inherit. If it weren’t for our wall, the house would have been gutted, taken over by squatters, or torched as soon as it was empty. As it was, all people did was take back things they had given to Mrs. Sims after she was robbed, and take whatever food she had in the house. No sense letting it rot. We didn’t take her furniture or her rugs or her appliances. We could have, but we didn’t. We aren’t thieves. Wardell Parrish and Rosalee Payne think otherwise. They’re both small, rust-brown, sour-looking people like Mrs. Sims. They’re the children of a first cousin that Mrs. Sims had managed to keep contact and good relations with. He’s a widower twice over, no kids, and she’s been widowed once, seven kids. They’re not only brother and sister, but twins. Maybe that helps them get along with each other. They damn sure won’t get along with anyone else. They’re moving in today. They’ve been here a couple of times before to look the place over, and I guess they must have liked it better than their parents’ house. They shared that with 18 other people. I was busy in the den with my class of younger school kids, so I didn’t meet them until today, though I’ve heard Dad talking to them—heard them sit in our living room and insinuate that we had cleaned out Mrs. Sims house before they arrived. Dad kept his temper. “You know she was robbed during the month before she died,” he said. “You can check with the police about that—if you haven’t already. Since then the community has protected the house. We haven’t used it or stripped it. If you choose to live among us, you should understand that. We help each other, and we don’t steal.” “I wouldn’t expect you to say you did,” Wardell Parrish muttered. His sister jumped in before he could say more. “We’re not accusing anyone of anything,” she lied. “We just wondered. … We knew Cousin Marjorie had some nice things—jewelry that she inherited from her mother. … Very valuable. …” “Check with the police,” my father said. “Well, yes, I know, but. …” “This is a small community,” my father said. “We all know each other here. We depend on each other.” There was a silence. Perhaps the twins were getting the message. “We’re not very social,” Wardell Parrish said. “We mind our own business.” Again his sister jumped in before he could go on. “I’m sure everything will be all right,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get along fine.” I didn’t like them when I heard them. I liked them even less when I met them. They look at us as though we smell and they don’t. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether I like them or not. There are other people in the neighborhood whom I don’t like. But I don’t trust the Payne-Parrishes. The kids seem all right, but the adults. … I wouldn’t want to have to depend on them. Not even for little things. Payne and Parrish. What perfect names they have. Saturday, February 22, 2025 We ran into a pack of feral dogs today. We went to the hills today for target practice—me, my father, Joanne Garfield, her cousin and boyfriend Harold— Harry—Baiter, my boyfriend Curtis Talcott, his brother Michael, Aura Moss and her brother Peter. Our other adult Guardian was Joanne’s father Jay. He’s a good guy and a good shot. Dad likes to work with him, although sometimes there are problems. The Garfields and the Baiters are white, and the rest of us are black. That can be dangerous these days. On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they let us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games. Everything went as usual at first. The Talcotts got into an argument first with each other, then with the Mosses. The Mosses are always blaming other people for whatever they do wrong, so they tend to have disputes outstanding with most of us. Peter Moss is the worst because he’s always trying to be like his father, and his father is a total shit. His father has three wives. All at once, Karen, Natalie, and Zahra. They’ve all got kids by him, though so far, Zahra, the youngest and prettiest, only has one. Karen is the one with the marriage license, but she let him get away with bringing in first one, then another new woman into the house and calling them his wives. I guess the way things are, she didn’t think she could make it on her own with three kids when he brought in Natalie and five by the time he found Zahra. The Mosses don’t come to church. Richard Moss has put together his own religion—a combination of the Old Testament and historical West African practices. He claims that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of women, and fathers of as many children as possible. He’s an engineer for one of the big commercial water companies, so he can afford to pick up beautiful, young homeless women and live with them in polygamous relationships. He could pick up twenty women like that if he could afford to feed them. I hear there’s a lot of that kind of thing going on in other neighborhoods. Some middle class men prove they’re men by having a lot of wives in temporary or permanent relationships. Some upper class men prove they’re men by having one wife and a lot of beautiful, disposable young servant girls. Nasty. When the girls get pregnant, if their rich employers won’t protect them, the employers’ wives throw them out to starve. Is that the way it’s going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner’s version of slavery or Richard Moss’s. We rode our bikes to the top of River Street past the last neighborhood walls, past the last ragged, unwalled houses, past the last stretch of broken asphalt and rag and stick shacks of squatters and street poor who stare at us in their horrible, empty way, and then higher into the hills along a dirt road. At last we dismounted and walked our bikes down the narrow trail into one of the canyons that we and others use for target practice. It looked all right this time, but we always have to be careful. People use canyons for a lot of things. If we find corpses in one, we stay away from it for a while. Dad tries to shield us from what goes on in the world, but he can’t. Knowing that, he also tries to teach us to shield ourselves. Most of us have practiced at home with BB guns on homemade targets or on squirrel and bird targets. I’ve done all that. My aim is good, but I don’t like it with the birds and squirrels. Dad was the one who insisted on my learning to shoot them. He said moving targets would be good for my aim. I think there was more to it than that. I think he wanted to see whether or not I could do it— whether shooting a bird or a squirrel would trigger my hyperempathy It didn’t, quite. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t painful. It felt like a big, soft, strange ghost blow, like getting hit with a huge ball of air, but with no coolness, no feeling of wind. The blow, though still soft, was a little harder with squirrels and sometimes rats than with birds. All three had to be killed, though. They ate our food or ruined it. Tree-crops were their special victims: Peaches, plums, figs, persimmons, nuts. … And crops like strawberries, blackberries, grapes. … Whatever we planted, if they could get at it, they would. Birds are particular pests because they can fly in, yet I like them. I envy their ability to fly. Sometimes I get up and go out at dawn just so I can watch them without anyone scaring them or shooting them. Now that I’m old enough to go target shooting on Saturdays, I don’t intend to shoot any more birds, no matter what Dad says. Besides, just because I can shoot a bird or a squirrel doesn’t mean I could shoot a person—a thief like the ones who robbed Mrs. Sims. I don’t know whether I could do that. And if I did it, I don’t know what would happen to me. Would I die? It’s my father’s fault that we pay so much attention to guns and shooting. He carries a nine millimeter automatic pistol whenever he leaves the neighborhood. He carries it on his hip where people can see it. He says that discourages mistakes. Armed people do get killed—most often in crossfires or by snipers— but unarmed people get killed a lot more often. Dad also has a silenced nine millimeter submachine gun. It stays at home with Cory in case something happens there while he’s away. Both guns are German—Heckler & Koch. Dad has never said where he got the submachine gun. It’s illegal, of course, so I don’t blame him. It must have cost a hell of a lot. He’s only had it away from home a few times so he, Cory, and I could get the feel of it. He’ll do the same for the boys when they’re older. Cory has an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver that she’s good with. She’s had it since before she married Dad. She loaned that one to me today. Ours aren’t the best or the newest guns in the neighborhood, but they all work. Dad and Cory keep them in good condition. I have to help with that now. And they spend the necessary time on practice and money on ammunition. At neighborhood association meetings, Dad used to push the adults of every household to own weapons, maintain them, and know how to use them. “Know how to use them so well,” he’s said more than once, “that you’re as able to defend yourself at two A.M. as you are at two P.M.” At first there were a few neighbors who didn’t like that—older ones who said it was the job of the police to protect them, younger ones who worried that their little children would find their guns, and religious ones who didn’t think a minister of the gospel should need guns. This was several years ago. “The police,” my father told them, “may be able to avenge you, but they can’t protect you. Things are getting worse. And as for your children. … Well, yes, there is risk. But you can put your guns out of their reach while they’re very young, and train them as they grow older. That’s what I mean to do. I believe they’ll have a better chance of growing up if you can protect them.” He paused, stared at the people, then went on. “I have a wife and five children,” he said. “I will pray for them all. I’ll also see to it that they know how to defend themselves. And for as long as I can, I will stand between my family and any intruder.” He paused again. “Now that’s what I have to do. You all do what you have to do.” By now there are at least two guns in every household. Dad says he suspects that some of them are so well hidden—like Mrs. Sims’ gun—that they wouldn’t be available in an emergency. He’s working on that. All the kids who attend school at our house get gun handling instruction. Once they’ve passed that and turned fifteen, two or three of the neighborhood adults begin taking them to the hills for target practice. It’s a kind of rite of passage for us. My brother Keith has been whining to go along whenever someone gets a shooting group together, but the age rule is firm. I worry about the way Keith wants to get his hands on the guns. Dad doesn’t seem to worry, but I do. There are always a few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rabbits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge whatever dies. The dogs used to belong to people—or their ancestors did. But dogs eat meat. These days, no poor or middle class person who had an edible piece of meat would give it to a dog. Rich people still keep dogs, either because they like them or because they use them to guard estates, enclaves, and businesses. The rich have plenty of other security devices, but the dogs are extra insurance. Dogs scare people. I did some shooting today, and I was leaning against a boulder, watching others shoot, when I realized there was a dog nearby, watching me. Just one dog —male, yellow-brown, sharp-eared, short-haired. He wasn’t big enough to make a meal of me, and I still had the Smith & Wesson, so while he was looking me over, I took a good look at him. He was lean, but he didn’t look starved. He looked alert and curious. He sniffed the air, and I remembered that dogs were supposed to be oriented more toward scent than sight. “Look at that,” I said to Joanne Garfield who was standing nearby. She turned, gasped, and jerked her gun up to aim at the dog. The dog vanished into the dry brush and boulders. Turning, Joanne tried to look everywhere as though she expected to see more dogs stalking us, but there was nothing. She was shaking. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were afraid of them.” She drew a deep breath and looked at the place where the dog had been. “I didn’t know I was either,” she whispered. “I’ve never been so close to one before. I … I wish I had gotten a better look at it.” At that moment, Aura Moss screamed and fired her fathers Llama automatic. I pushed away from the boulder and turned to see Aura pointing her gun toward some rocks and babbling. “It was over there!” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “It was some kind of animal—dirty yellow with big teeth. It had its mouth open. It was huge!” “You stupid bitch, you almost shot me!” Michael Talcott shouted. I could see now that he had ducked down behind a boulder. He would have been in Aura’s line of fire, but he didn’t seem to be hurt. “Put your gun away, Aura,” my father said. He kept his voice low, but he was angry. I could see that, whether Aura could or not. “It was an animal,” she insisted. “A big one. It might still be around.” “Aura!” My father raised his voice and hardened it. Aura looked at him, then seemed to realize that she had more than a dog to worry about. She looked at the gun in her hand, frowned, fumbled it safe, and put it back into her holster. “Mike?” my father said. “I’m okay,” Michael Talcott said. “No thanks to her!” “It wasn’t my fault,” Aura said, right on cue. “There was an animal. It could have killed you! It was sneaking up on us!” “I think it was just a dog,” I said. “There was one watching us over here. Joanne moved and it ran away.” “You should have killed it,” Peter Moss said. “What do you want to do? Wait until it jumps someone.” “What was it doing?” Jay Garfield asked. “Just watching?” “That’s all,” I said. “It didn’t look sick or starved. It wasn’t very big. I don’t think it was a danger to anyone here. There are too many of us, and we’re all too big.” “The thing I saw was huge,” Aura insisted. “It had its mouth open!” I went over to her because I’d had a sudden thought. “It was panting,” I said. “They pant when they’re hot. It doesn’t mean they’re angry or hungry.” I hesitated, watching her. “You’ve never seen one before, have you?” She shook her head. “They’re bold, but they’re not dangerous to a group like this. You don’t have to worry.” She didn’t look as though she quite believed me, but she seemed to relax a little. The Moss girls were both bullied and sheltered. They were almost never allowed to leave the walls of the neighborhood. They were educated at home by their mothers according to the religion their father had assembled, and they were warned away from the sin and contamination of the rest of the world. I’m surprised that Aura was allowed to come to us for gun handling instruction and target practice. I hope it will be good for her—and I hope the rest of us will survive. “All of you stay where you are,” Dad said. He glanced at Jay Garfield, then went a short way up among the rocks and scrub oaks to see whether Aura had shot anything. He kept his gun in his hand and the safety off. He was out of our sight for no more than a minute. He came back with a look on his face that I couldn’t read. “Put your guns away,” he said. “We’re going home.” “Did I kill it?” Aura demanded. “No. Get your bikes.” He and Jay Garfield whispered together for a moment, and Jay Garfield sighed. Joanne and I watched them, wondering, knowing we wouldn’t hear anything from them until they were ready to tell us. “This is not about a dead dog,” Harold Baiter said behind us. Joanne moved back to stand beside him. “It’s about either a dog pack or a human pack,” I said, “or maybe it’s a corpse.” It was, as I found out later, a family of corpses: A woman, a little boy of about four years, and a just-born infant, all partly eaten. But Dad didn’t tell me that until we got home. At the canyon, all we knew was that he was upset. “If there were a corpse around here, we would have smelled it,” Harry said. “Not if it were fresh,” I countered. Joanne looked at me and sighed the way her father sighs. “If its that, I wonder where we’ll go shooting next time. I wonder when there’ll be a next time.” Peter Moss and the Talcott brothers had gotten into an argument over whose fault it was that Aura had almost shot Michael, and Dad had to break it up. Then Dad checked with Aura to see that she was all right. He said a few things to her that I couldn’t hear, and I saw a tear slide down her face. She cries easily. She always has. Dad walked away from her looking harassed. He led us up the path out of the canyon. We walked our bikes, and we all kept looking around. We could see now that there were other dogs nearby. We were being watched by a big pack. Jay Garfield brought up the rear, guarding our backs. “He said we should stick together,” Joanne told me. She had seen me looking back at her father. “You and I?” “Yeah, and Harry. He said we should look out for one another.” “I don’t think these dogs are stupid enough or hungry enough to attack us in daylight. They’ll go after some lone street person tonight.” “Shut up, for godsake.” The road was narrow going up and out of the canyon. It would have been a bad place to have to fight off dogs. Someone could trip and step off the crumbling edge. Someone could be knocked off the edge by a dog or by one of us. That would mean falling several hundred feet. Down below, I could hear dogs fighting now. We may have been close to their dens or whatever they lived in. I thought maybe we were just close to what they were feeding on. “If they come,” my father said in a quiet, even voice, “Freeze, aim, and fire. That will save you. Nothing else will. Freeze, aim, and fire. Keep your eyes open and stay calm.” I replayed the words in my mind as we went up the switchbacks. No doubt Dad wanted us to replay them. I could see that Aura was still leaking tears and smearing and streaking her face with dirt like a little kid. She was too wrapped up in her own misery and fear to be of much use. We got almost to the top before anything happened. We were beginning to relax, I think. I hadn’t seen a dog for a while. Then, from the front of our line, we heard three shots. We all froze, most of, us unable to see what had happened. “Keep moving,” my father called. “It’s all right. It was just one dog getting too close.” “Are you okay?” I called. “Yes,” he said. “Just come on and keep your eyes open.” One by one, we came abreast of the dog that had been shot and walked past it. It was a bigger, grayer animal than the one I had seen. There was a beauty to it. It looked like pictures I had seen of wolves. It was wedged against a hanging boulder just a few steps up the steep canyon wall from us. It moved. I saw its bloody wounds as it twisted. I bit my tongue as the pain I knew it must feel became my pain. What to do? Keep walking? I couldn’t. One more step and I would fall and lie in the dirt, helpless against the pain. Or I might fall into the canyon. “It’s still alive,” Joanne said behind me. “It’s moving.” Its forefeet were making little running motions, its claws scraping against the rock. I thought I would throw up. My belly hurt more and more until I felt skewered through the middle. I leaned on my bike with my left arm. With my right hand, I drew the Smith & Wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head. I felt the impact of the bullet as a hard, solid blow—something beyond pain. Then I felt the dog die. I saw it jerk, shudder, stretch its body long, then freeze. I saw it die. I felt it die. It went out like a match in a sudden vanishing of pain. Its life flared up, then went out. I went a little numb. Without the bike, I would have collapsed. People had crowded close before and behind me. I heard them before I could see them clearly. “It’s dead,” I heard Joanne say “Poor thing.” “What?” my father demanded. “Another one?” I managed to focus on him. He must have skirted close to the cliff-edge of the road to have gotten all the way back to us. And he must have run. “The same one,” I said, managing to straighten up. “It wasn’t dead. We saw it moving.” “I put three bullets into it,” he said. “It was moving, Reverend Olamina,” Joanne insisted. “It was suffering. If Lauren hadn’t shot it, someone else would have had to.” Dad sighed. “Well, it isn’t suffering now. Let’s get out of here.” Then he seemed to realize what Joanne had said. He looked at me. “Are you all right?” I nodded. I don’t know how I looked. No one was reacting to me as though I looked odd, so I must not have shown much of what I had gone through. I think only Harry Baiter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot. “Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day Pow!” “Let’s go.” My father said. We began walking up the path again. We left the canyon and made our way down to the street. There were no more dogs. I walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog I had killed. I had felt it die, and yet I had not died. I had felt its pain as though it were a human being. I had felt its life flare and go out, and I was still alive. Pow. 5 Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Sunday, March 2, 2025 IT’S RAINING. We heard last night on the radio that there was a storm sweeping in from the Pacific, but most people didn’t believe it. “We’ll have wind,” Cory said. “Wind and maybe a few drops of rain, or maybe just a little cool weather. That would be welcome. It’s all we’ll get.” That’s all there has been for six years. I can remember the rain six years ago, water swirling around the back porch, not high enough to come into the house, but high enough to attract my brothers who wanted to play in it. Cory, forever worried about infection, wouldn’t let them. She said they’d be splashing around in a soup of all the waste-water germs we’d been watering our gardens with for years. Maybe she was right, but kids all over the neighborhood covered themselves with mud and earthworms that day, and nothing terrible happened to them. But that storm was almost tropical—a quick, hard, warm, September rain, the edge of a hurricane that hit Mexico’s Pacific coast. This is a colder, winter storm. It began this morning as people were coming to church. In the choir we sang rousing old hymns accompanied by Cory’s piano playing and lightning and thunder from outside. It was wonderful. Some people missed part of the sermon, though, because they went home to put out all the barrels, buckets, tubs, and pots they could find to catch the free water. Other went home to put pots and buckets inside where there were leaks in the roof. I can’t remember when any of us have had a roof repaired by a professional. We all have Spanish tile roofs, and that’s good. A tile roof is, I suspect, more secure and lasting than wood or asphalt shingles. But time, wind, and earthquakes have taken a toll. Tree limbs have done some damage, too. Yet no one has extra money for anything as nonessential as roof repair. At best, some of the neighborhood men go up with whatever materials they can scavenge and create makeshift patches. No one’s even done that for a while. If it only rains once every six or seven years, why bother? Our roof is all right so far, and the barrels and things we put out after services this morning are full or filling. Good, clean, free water from the sky. If only it came more often. Monday, March 3, 2025 Still raining. No thunder today, though there was some last night. Steady drizzle, and occasional, heavy showers all day. All day. So different and beautiful. I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by water. I went out and walked in the rain until I was soaked. Cory didn’t want me to, but I did it anyway. It was so wonderful. How can she not understand that? It was so incredible and wonderful. Tuesday, March 4, 2025 Amy Dunn is dead. Three years old, unloved, and dead. That doesn’t seem reasonable or even possible. She could read simple words and count to thirty. I taught her. She so much loved getting attention that she stuck to me during school hours and drove me crazy. Didn’t want me to go to the bathroom without her. Dead. I had gotten to like her, even though she was a pest. Today I walked her home after class. I had gotten into the habit of walking her home because the Dunns wouldn’t send anyone for her. “She knows the way,” Christmas said. “Just send her over. She’ll get here all right.” I didn’t doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges—one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amy’s scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald. I took her to her door and left her in the care of her mother. “You didn’t have to get her so wet,” Tracy complained. “Might as well enjoy the rain while it lasts,” I said, and I left them. I saw Tracy take Amy into the house and shut the door. Yet somehow Amy wound up outside again, wound up near the front gate, just opposite the Garfield/Balter/Dory house. Jay Garfield found her there when he came out to investigate what he thought was another bundle that someone had thrown over the gate. People toss us things sometimes—gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us. Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate. It had to be an accidental hit because you can’t see through our gate from the outside. The shooter either fired at someone who was in front of the gate or fired at the gate itself, at the neighborhood, at us and our supposed wealth and privilege. Most bullets wouldn’t have gotten through the gate. It’s supposed to be bulletproof. But it’s been penetrated a couple of times before, high up, near the top. Now we have six new bullet holes in the lower portion—six holes and a seventh dent, a long, smooth gauge where a bullet had glanced off without breaking through. We hear so much gunfire, day and night, single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasional blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs. We worry most about those last things, but they’re rare. It’s harder to steal big weapons, and not many people around here can afford to buy the illegal ones—or that’s what Dad says. The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we don’t hear it. A couple of the Baiter kids said they heard shooting, but as usual, they paid no attention to it. It was outside, beyond the wall, after all. Most of us heard nothing except the rain. Amy was going to turn four in a couple of weeks. I had planned to give her a little party with my kindergartners. God, I hate this place. I mean, I love it. It’s home. These are my people. But I hate it. It’s like an island surrounded by sharks—except that sharks don’t bother you unless you go in the water. But our land sharks are on their way in. It’s just a matter of how long it takes for them to get hungry enough. Wednesday, March 5, 2025 I walked in the rain again this morning. It was cold, but good. Amy has already been cremated. I wonder if her mother is relieved. She doesn’t look relieved. She never liked Amy, but now she cries. I don’t think she’s faking. The family has spent money it could not afford to get the police involved to try to find the killer. I suspect that the only good this will do will be to chase away the people who live on the sidewalks and streets nearest to our wall. Is that good? The street poor will be back, and they won’t love us for sicking the cops on them. It’s illegal to camp out on the street the way they do—the way they must—so the cops knock them around, rob them if they have anything worth stealing, then order them away or jail them. The miserable will be made even more miserable. None of that can help Amy. I suppose, though, that it will make the Dunns feel better about the way they treated her. On Saturday, Dad will preach Amy’s funeral. I wish I didn’t have to be there. Funerals have never bothered me before, but this one does. “You cared about Amy,” Joanne Garfield said to me when I complained to her. We had lunch together today. We ate in my bedroom because it’s still raining off and on, and the rest of the house was full of all the kids who hadn’t gone home to eat lunch. But my room is still mine. It’s the one place in the world where I can go and not be followed by anyone I don’t invite in. I’m the only person I know who has a bedroom to herself. These days, even Dad and Cory knock before they open my door. That’s one of the best things about being the only daughter in the family. I have to kick my brothers out of here all the time, but at least I can kick them out. Joanne is an only child, but she shares a room with three younger girl cousins—whiny Lisa, always demanding and complaining; smart, giggly Robin with her near-genius I.Q.; and invisible Jessica who whispers and stares at her feet and cries if you give her a dirty look. All three are Baiters—Harry’s sisters and the children of Joanne’s mother’s sister. The two adult sisters, their husbands, their eight children, and their parents Mr. and Mrs. Dory are all squeezed into one five-bedroom house. It isn’t the most crowded house in the neighborhood, but I’m glad I don’t have to live like that. “Almost no one cared about Amy,” Joanne said. “But you did.” “After the fire, I did,” I said. “I got scared for her then. Before that, I ignored her like everyone else.” “So now you’re feeling guilty?” “No.” “Yes, you are.” I looked at her, surprised. “I mean it. No. I hate that she’s dead, and I miss her, but I didn’t cause her death. I just can’t deny what all this says about us.” “What?” I felt on the verge of talking to her about things I hadn’t talked about before. I’d written about them. Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about. But Joanne is a friend. She knows me better than most people, and she has a brain. Why not talk to her? Sooner or later, I have to talk to someone. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She had opened a plastic container of bean salad. Now she put it down on my night table. “Don’t you ever wonder if maybe Amy and Mrs. Sims are the lucky ones?” I asked. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of us?” There was a clap of dull, muffled thunder, and a sudden heavy shower. Radio weather reports say today’s rain will be the last of the four-day series of storms. I hope not. “Sure I think about it,” Joanne said. “With people shooting little kids, how can I not think about it?” “People have been killing little kids since there’ve been people,” I said. “Not in here, they haven’t. Not until now.” “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it. We got a wake-up call. Another one.” “What are you talking about?” “Amy was the first of us to be killed like that. She won’t be the last.” Joanne sighed, and there was a little shudder in the sigh. “So you think so, too.” “I do. But I didn’t know you thought about it at all.” “Rape, robbery, and now murder. Of course I think about it. Everyone thinks about it. Everyone worries. I wish I could get out of here.” “Where would you go?” “That’s it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.” “There might be.” “Not if you don’t have money. Not if all you know how to do is take care of babies and cook.” I shook my head. “You know much more than that.” “Maybe, but none of it matters. I won’t be able to afford college. I won’t be able to get a job or move out of my parents’ house because no job I could get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.” “I know,” I said. “And as bad as that is, there’s more.” “Who needs more? That’s enough!” She began to eat the bean salad. It looked good, but I thought I might be about to ruin it for her. “There’s cholera spreading in southern Mississippi and Louisiana,” I said. “I heard about it on the radio yesterday. There are too many poor people— illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted. And you know that drug that makes people want to set fires?” She nodded, chewing. “It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!” “I heard about the measles,” Joanne said. “Strange. Even if people can’t afford immunizations, measles shouldn’t kill.” “Those people are half dead already,” I told her. “They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can’t afford immunizations. We’re lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don’t see how we’ll be able to do even that for them.” “I know, I know.” She sounded almost bored. “Things are bad. My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.” “Normal,” I muttered. “I wonder what that is. Do you agree with your mother?” “No. Donner hasn’t got a chance. I think he would fix things if he could, but Harry says his ideas are scary. Harry says he’ll set the country back a hundred years.” “My father says something like that. I’m surprised that Harry agrees.” “He would. His own father thinks Donner is God. Harry wouldn’t agree with him on anything.” I laughed, distracted, thinking about Harry’s battles with his father. Neighborhood fireworks—plenty of flash, but no real fire. “Why do you want to talk about this stuff,” Joanne asked, bringing me back to the real fire. “We can’t do anything about it.” “We have to.” “Have to what? We’re fifteen! What can we do?” “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!” She just stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was rolling—too fast, maybe. “I’m talking about this place, Jo, this culde-sac with a wall around it. I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in. I’m talking about what we’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild—or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars.” “Someone’s going to just smash in our wall and come in?” “More likely blast it down, or blast the gate open. It’s going to happen some day. You know that as well as I do.” “Oh, no I don’t,” she protested. She sat up straight, almost stiff, her lunch forgotten for the moment. I bit into a piece of acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts. It’s a favorite of mine, but I managed to chew and swallow without tasting it. “Jo, we’re in for trouble. You’ve already admitted that.” “Sure,” she said. “More shootings, more break-ins. That’s what I meant.” “And that’s what will happen for a while. I wish I could guess how long. We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come. And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho.” She held herself rigid, rejecting. “You don’t know that! You can’t read the future. No one can.” “You can,” I said, “if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy. In LA. some walled communities bigger and stronger than this one just aren’t there any more. Nothing left but ruins, rats, and squatters. What happened to them can happen to us. We’ll die in here unless we get busy now and work out ways to survive.” “If you think that, why don’t you tell your parents. Warn them and see what they say.” “I intend to as soon as I think of a way to do it that will reach them. Besides … I think they already know. I think my father does, anyway. I think most of the adults know. They don’t want to know, but they do.” “My mother could be right about Donner. He really could do some good.” “No. No, Donner’s just a kind of human banister.” “A what?” “I mean he’s like … like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American Presidents make people feel that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still here—that we’ll get through these bad times and back to normal.” “We could,” she said. “We might. I think someday we will.” No, she didn’t. She was too bright to take anything but the most superficial comfort from her denial. But even superficial comfort is better than none, I guess. I tried another tactic. “Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.” “What’s your point?” “The changes.” I thought for a moment. They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.” “So?” “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-bystep changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” “Your father says he doesn’t believe people changed the climate in spite of what scientists say. He says only God could change the world in such an important way.” “Do you believe him?” She opened her mouth, looked at me, then closed it again. After a while, she said, “I don’t know.” “My father has his blind spots,” I said. “He’s the best person I know, but even he has blind spots.” “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “We can’t make the climate change back, no matter why it changed in the first place. You and I can’t. The neighborhood can’t. We can’t do anything.” I lost patience. “Then let’s kill ourselves now and be done with it!” She frowned, her round, too serious face almost angry. She tore bits of peel from a small navel orange. “What then?” she demanded. “What can we do?” I put the last bite of my acorn bread down and went around her to my night table. I took several bo...