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ellenogrady.bsky.social

@ellenogrady.bsky.social

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ellenogrady.bsky.social @ellenogrady.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

From an essay Octavia Butler wrote in 2000 for Essence magazine, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.

When a student asks Butler what the answer is to ending the suffering in the world, she replies, “…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

ellenogrady.bsky.social @ellenogrady.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

[ID: six panels in color. Panel one: Dean Spade is saying “I’m hearing a lot of people struggling with hopelessness right now”. Beneath him a fiery landscape with birds flying in all directions. Panel two: “and I’m thinking it may be the moment to shift what we have hope and faith in“. A blue room with a figure packing a bag. The open window shows a fiery landscape with two birds flying. Panel three: “it’s actually appropriate to be letting go of the false promises of liberalism“. The image of a hand with sand running through the fingers. Panel four: “the idea that billionaires or tech solutions or legislation or court cases or elected officials will save us “. An image of trees burnt by fire, surrounded by a red sky. Panel five: “instead of recognizing that no one‘s coming to save us. That it’s on us.” An image a red bird describing birds flying from a fire to four blue birds that are surrounding and listening to them. Panel 6: “that we really only have each other in our ability to care for one another”. Five red birds soaring into a blue sky.]