Gorgeously Stupid: Politics with the Handmaid

Pg. 174:
“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
“Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.
…
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
…
“Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen. Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

It should be easy to note the parallels between this passage and our own government today. 9/11 was our own catastrophe, the enemy Islamic fanatics. And when on television they tell you to keep calm, they know damn well it’s the opposite of what you’ll do. When they tell you to keep calm, you should know it’s the opposite of what they want you to do.

Give people something to be afraid of. Make it vague. Make it expansive. Make it all-inclusive. Make people suspicious of their friends and neighbors, of their brothers and sisters. Make people want “their” protection. “…since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful,” she writes. People will give up their civil liberties for protection, and that has been a prevalent concern in post-9/11 America. Our money- and power-hungry government wants to clamp down on its people for its own ends, not to help or protect us but to further their own selfish mission toward money, power, and control of everything they can get their hands on. And no one says anything, no one does anything, because they deem it necessary to stay “protected.” When it comes down to it, the average American will prioritize his material possessions above his liberties, his “mental possessions.”

Our media can tell us anything, and we believe it. Our president can tell us anything, and we believe it. Our favorite sports and pop stars can tell us anything, and not only do we believe it, but we spend more time thinking about it and repeating it and perpetuating those ideas than we do about things that are important, that affect us, that affect our brothers, sisters, neighbors and friends. In this world of distraction, we pay so little attention to what’s going on in real life (and by that I mean life as the average man or woman knows it, life as refugees know it, life as the minimum wage worker knows it, life as minorities know it) that our government can (and does) get away with (literally) murder (genocide, if you really want to get specific) and not only do we not DO anything about it, most of us don’t even KNOW. “Oh, that’s just liberal hooey,” or “That’s just radical nonsense.”

But it’s not hooey or nonsense-- our government kills and controls people in other countries without repercussion; if we don’t wise up to the way things actually work and start paying attention, start acting like we care, start understanding and disseminating and doing, they will be able to do the same thing here and no one will be able to stop them. I’m not suggesting that one day in the future I’ll be stuck in red robes and a white cone hat, getting fucked by some other woman’s husband just to give them a baby. But I do worry that, slowly, our freedom of speech, our right to gather in peaceful protest, our right to, basically, live as we wish, are being whittled away. Slowly, so it’s not like ripping a bandaid off in one swipe - surely, we’d feel that. No, very slowly, so that we hardly notice, what with working 5 or 6 days a week, 8 to 10 to 12 hours per day, raising families on less than the living wage, paying bills, keeping up with the Joneses.

Tags: