Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the celebrated science fiction writer, imagined a near-future dystopia set approximately in the United States of our time now. As I tell my students, she was extrapolating from her here-and-now to write stories set the future. While she was imagining what the future might be like, she was also writing about her present due to it being her initial starting conditions. For her novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), she wrote in recognition of the effects of climate change–especially in California, concern for the push for de-regulation by the wealthy, and response to an earlier president who used the campaign phrase “Make America Great Again,” Ronald Reagan. The following passage is the epigraph to chapter eleven in Parable of the Talents. It has stayed with me. All of her points can allude to today and serve as a warning for considering our leaders in the future:
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
