Noel > Recent Status Updates

“The problem, of course, with throwing people away is that they don’t go away. They stay in the society that turned its back on them. And whether that society likes it or not, they find all sorts of things to do.” ~ A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler

"Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than frightened, confused, desperate people looking for solutions is frightened, confused, desperate people finding and settling for truly bad solutions." ~ A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler

"That leader has his own answers. He turns his true believers—his thugs—loose on those he chooses as scapegoats and he looks around for an external enemy to use as an even bigger scapegoat and a diversion from the reality that he doesn't really know what to do. Because of him, innocent people lose their freedom, lose custody of their children, lose their lives." ~ A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler

"Hunting for scapegoats is always popular in times of serious trouble. So is hunting for the great leader who will restore prosperity and stability. Some people know that that's the answer. If they could just find the strong, powerful leader that they need, all would be well. And, unhappily for them, they do find such a leader." ~ A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler

“But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.” ~ Lauren Olamina

"But the church wasn't only a religion. It was a community—my community. I didn't want to be free of it. That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely. Everyone need to be part of something." ~ Larkin Olamina

"Better, I decided after much thought and much reading of history, to live a decent life and behave well toward other people. Better not to worry about the Christian Americans, the Catholics, the Lutherans, or whatever. Each denomination seemed to think that it had the truth and the only truth and is people were going to bliss in heaven while everyone else went to eternal torment in hell." ~ Larkin Olamina

"Newspeople have a hard time opposing anything [Jarret] wants because he's always on God's side. Guess whose side that puts them on." ~ Lauren Olamina

"The truth is, preparing for interstellar travel and then sending out ships filled with colonists is bound to be a job so long, thankless, expensive, and difficult that I suspect that only a religion could do it." ~ Lauren Olamina

"Fulfilling the Destiny is a long-term, expensive, uncertain project—or rather it's hundreds of projects. Maybe thousands. And with no guarantees of anything. Politicians, on the other hand, are short-term thinkers, opportunists, sometimes with consciences, but opportunists nevertheless. Business people are hungry for profit, short- and long-term." ~ Lauren Olamina

"We can choose: We can go on building an destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest." ~ Lauren Olamina

"We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way thing always have been." ~ Lauren Olamina

"We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another." ~ Lauren Olamina

"I wanted us to understand what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been." ~ Lauren Olamina

"His fanatical Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, utterly destroyed her first effort, but there's no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret's attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.
"If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived." ~ Larkin Olamina

"But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger that he never noticed her." ~ Larkin Olamina

"We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another." ~ Lauren Olamina

"There are times when I wished I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean." ~ Lauren Olamina

"The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, then to be deeply religious and more willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have." ~ Lauren Olamina

"But those dedicated to other religions, and those who are not religious at all sneer at Jarret and call him a hypocrite. They sneer, they hate him, but they also fear him. They see him for the tyrant that he is. And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver." ~ Lauren Olamina

"Even some of the less religious ones support [Jarret]. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again." ~ Lauren Olamina

"In fact, Jarret is both loved and despised here. The religious poor who are ignorant, frightened, and desperate to improve their situations are glad to see a 'man of God' in the White House. And that's what he is to them: a man of God." ~ Lauren Olamina

"Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don't think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life." ~ Larkin Olamina

"The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven." ~ Larkin Olamina

"There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans—about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul." ~ Larkin Olamina

"Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret," I said. "We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have survived. We have tools that other people don't have, and that they need. The time will come again when we can share what we know." ~ Lauren Olamina

"If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ's flock—our Jarret's flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, by childhood was at least physically comfortable." ~ Larkin Olamina

"We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
"So much agony caused, so much evil done in God's name." ~ Larkin Olamina

"Christian America was, at first, much more a refuge for the ignorant and the intolerant than it should have been. Even people who would never beat or burn another person could treat suddenly orphaned or abducted children with cold, self-righteous cruelty." ~ Larkin Olamina

"For people like my mother, Jarret's fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret's first year in office, the worst of his follower ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability, the fanatics set up the camps." ~ Larkin Olamina