reflections on parable day

Parable of the Sower begins on July 20th, 2024. If all goes according to plan, that’s the day I’m posting this. 

I just read Parable of the Sower for the first time. It’s a book I’ve been avoiding because of how intense Octavia Butler’s books can be. Recently, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Octavia sees and names Truths well and I didn’t feel ready for the mirror she would reflect at me. I felt called to seek it out and committed to reading it. What I found was an eerily uncanny mirror into our current lives, decades ahead of when Octavia Butler published this book in 1993. 

As I write this, I am recovering from my second infection of SARS-CoV-2, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, what we colloquially refer to as covid. Writing it out this way makes it sound scary. I made that choice on purpose. Masks are effective at slowing the transmission of the deadly virus yet when I’m out in public in one of the most densely populated cities in the US, I can usually count on one hand the number of other people who are wearing high quality masks. Despite studies showing that Covid has a long term impact on our bodies more similar to that of HIV than a common flu, policy makers and the general public ignore the continued and increasing risk of the virus. Our country’s (not new) tumble into fascism is becoming a free fall, several states going so far as to push mask bans. 

I bring this up to point out the cloud of denial we continue to live in regarding just one deadly facet of our current lives, not to mention the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, the genocide in Sudan, and the genocide in the Congo, among many, many, many other grotesque and unconscionable abuses of power.

The Earthseed verse that opens up chapter 5 of Parable of the Sower reads

Belief 

Initiates and guides action—

Or it does nothing. 

In chapter 5, Lauren Olamina, the main character of the novel, has a conversation with her best friend in their community, Joanne, discussing how terrible their situation is and the ways in which it is continuing to get worse. 

“Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people are 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!”

Joanne asks what either of them can do at fifteen about the shit they witness going down. Lauren says:

“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 battered around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”

I’m doing my best to prepare in the ways I can, learning what is available to me, watching my comrades do the same. We don’t have to let the horrors of the world kill us. I’m getting increasingly frustrated by calls to vote in the upcoming election to avoid the threat of project 2025 (genuinely scary) and the doom that should befall us if Trump ends up in the White House again. Even though I have many people on my phone, in my ear, and in my life arguing that a senile, war-mongering, genocide funding Democratic nominee would be a better alternative, I can’t believe them. 

In reference to the presidential election happening in their time, Lauren says of Donner, a candidate in the race, 

“I mean he’s like… like a symbol of the past for us to hold onto 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 they grew up with is still here—that we’ll get through these bad times and back to normal”

Joanne suggests that it might be possible to someday get back to normal and Lauren knows “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” (56). 

Things right now are bad. And neither political party is going to be what makes it any better.

Like Lauren said, the president is simply a symbol. Don’t get me wrong, symbols are powerful things, but the President is a symbol of the American empire. A country built on the backs of enslaved Africans, massacred Natives, and continued violence here and abroad to protect the ill-got gains of the wealthy elite ruling class. Lauren points out the changes that occurred after the Bubonic Plague in Europe, and that it took a plague for folks to realize that change was possible and could even happen at all. 

“Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step 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”

The key point in Lauren’s discussion is that the old days are G O N E. They are simply not here anymore. And we can’t continue to move like they are. If the world is changing, the structures of our society are changing, the conditions in which we live are changing, then we too must change in order to survive. I return to the first verse of Earthseed Lauren shares with us:

All that you touch

You Change

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth 

Is Change.

God 

is Change.

In order to survive in a changing world, we must also be willing and able to change. We can’t always predict the change that is happening, though Octavia did one hell of a job doing that. Joanne has a point, we can’t necessarily “fix” the things that have gone wrong. But we can prepare for how to survive the changes, shape the changes, and create a life on the other side of them. 

This seems to be too much for Joanne, and frankly, many of us. Joanne says

“It doesn’t make any difference. 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.”

Finally Lauren loses her patience and snaps “Then let’s kill ourselves now and be done with it!”

Let’s get clear. Lauren is not suggesting to end their lives as a solution to the myriad problems they face. However, if the ultimate decision is that there is nothing to be done about the state of living, why bother living at all then? Joanne dismisses Lauren, saying she’s been reading too many adventure stories, and Lauren tells her

I want you to be serious. I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic

Waiting for something better will not save us. Continuing on a doomed path because we’re too scared to step into the untamed bush will not help us survive. Lauren admits she doesn’t know much, doesn’t know enough. But the way we’re currently going won’t get us very far. 

After getting covid the first time, I became so tired. Fatigue, body weakness, brain fog, all the long covid symptoms people talk about and others ignore until it becomes relevant to them. I don’t know what will happen after this infection. I feel it passing. I no longer have a fever, my sinuses are clearing, but I’m so far from being out of the woods. It’s been unpleasant, stuck in bed, isolated, and feeling feeble. I keep thinking about all of the Palestineans in Gaza right now with covid—something the occupying Israeli colonizers ensured by denying them vaccines, destroying all hospitals and medical resources, and denying aid of any kind to reach the population of people they are systematically wiping out. Having covid is hard for me with a wealth of resources at my disposal. I can’t imagine what people around the world, people here, with less access than I have, are dealing with. 

I cannot personal responsibility my way out of a global pandemic, nor can I do so with any of the other large scale structural problems we face right now. I choose to mask, to use air filters, to do what I can to prepare. I can choose to not pretend it doesn’t exist because it’s uncomfortable. I can choose to learn how to deal with these things as they come. Even at my most careful, I still got sick. But I was prepared for that happening and hopefully kept others as safe as I could. 
Shit right now is scary. It’s bad. And we are not helpless victims. We don’t have to be anyway. Before we can move though, we need to know where we are. We need to move with clarity, not denial. If there’s one thing you can do today, one change you can make to increase the survival of your community, what can you do?