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Journal by mcgrew

I discovered science fiction around 1960 when I was eight, and loved almost all of it until this century. Most of it was about trouble in paradise, whether video or literature. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm in high school, which was in the SF section of the library even though it wasn’t science fiction or speculative fiction, more like a fantasy morality tale. It was a warning about the Fascism America seems to now be marching towards.
        Because I liked that one, I found another one from Orwell, 1984. I stopped reading when the rats were biting the guy in the face, maybe halfway through that long, horrible story about the coming dystopian future that was supposed to happen forty years ago.
        There were very few of the horrible dystopias in the twentieth century, which is why 1984 stuck out so much. The only other dystopia I remember from my youth was the nineteenth century tome The Time Machine.
        Fahrenheit 451 was one I returned to the library after the first chapter. I don’t remember why I disliked it, it’s widely praised.
        Then this century I started buying SF magazines again, around 2010, and discovered that almost all of the new stuff was dystopian. F&SF didn’t have cover to cover dystopias like the rest of them, so I bought a subscription. By the time it was over I didn’t renew, because it, too, had become almost total dystopia. Facebook ads advertising SF all proudly shill how dystopian they are.
        I think I realize why all of the dystopia: This horrible century. Despite how technology has already surpassed most twentieth century speculation, there are other things making anyone born after 1984 think we’re heading towards a dystopian future: The terrorist attack on 9/11 that triggered a war that lasted twenty years; to anyone born in this century it was a lifelong war. Then two years after the Afghan war started, a second, incredibly stupid war in Iraq was started. Under the oil men Bush and Cheney, gasoline prices went from $1.05 to $4.50 at its height here in Springfield, followed by a banking crisis that very nearly put the world in a depression that could have made the Great Depression look like a mild recession in comparison. You can’t get to work without gasoline yet, and the high cost of getting to work killed budgets and mortgages. Luckily, we then elected a man who historians call the tenth best president, and catastrophe was averted.
        To a teenager or young adult then, the world just kept getting worse, especially to racists, since this president was Black.
        Then came our fourth worst president in American history, again according to historians, a very lazy man who had never had to work in his life, a multimillionaire at the age of three. In his administration’s last year, his laziness and aversion to reality and truth cost hundreds of thousands of American lives to a pandemic. I saw him as the American Nero, fiddling while America burned with Covid fever and a breathing tube down its throat.
        And the world is heating up, with people who have made fortunes selling the very thing causing the heating denying that it’s even happening, caring not that the world will be a hellish place if we don’t stop burning their poisons. I saw the same thing with the tobacco industries. These people simply don’t care about anything but wealth and power!
        To someone under about forty, the world has become worse and worse every year of their lives. Of course the future is dystopian, according to their own witness.
        The thing is, there has seldom been a real dystopian future. The past has almost always been more dystopian than almost every epoch’s present. The one time in western history that really did have a dystopian future was the Roman empire, as when it fell, the dark ages overtook the western world for centuries, until the Renaissance. Of course, the Roman empire was dystopian, far worse than most dystopian science fiction. Beheadings, crucifixions, execution by animal attack, plagues…
        Some would say that America had a dystopian future during the “roaring twenties” before the depression, but according to Grandma McGrew, who was in her twenties in the twenties, it only roared for the rich, while working class people lived in what we would consider a dystopia. Multiply that by a hundred if you weren’t White.
        Even during my own lifetime, America and most of the world’s nations have become less and less dystopian, except this century. In the previous century we had horrible institutional racism, with laws that separated White people from everyone else. I can remember seeing the first Black person I’d ever seen, when I was five or six. I was completely ignorant about race, having not been brought up as a racist, and only Whites and Hispanics (who look White to me) were on television. I said “Wow, look at the tan on that guy!” My mother turned bright red and the Black man chuckled. Most Whites were raised to be racist. Black people didn’t gain full rights until 1964, and racism today (even institutional) is far less than it was then.
        But it still exists. Most of my friends are racist and don’t even realize it.
        Once, when I was still working and smoking cigarettes, I huddled in the doorway to try to stay out of the rain, talking with a well-dressed, college educated professional Black woman, who was gesturing with her cigarette and grousing about how store employees would always follow her around to make sure she wasn’t stealing anything.
        I said I had the opposite problem: “I can never find sales people when I need them.” That’s institutional racism. When I’m pulled over, I worry I might get a ticket. When a Black person is pulled over, particularly if he’s a young man, they have to worry that the cop might murder them.
        That’s institutional racism. It’s our present dystopia, but not nearly as dystopian as when I was a child. A century earlier was far more dystopian, Black people weren’t even considered human, and were bought, sold, and worked like dogs or horses, and treated no better than dogs and horses.
        Throughout all of human history until the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was practiced world-wide. The ultimate dystopia, gone for a century and a half. I think racism a hundred years from now will be just an ugly relic of the past, like slavery is to us today.
        Part of the dystopia of my youth was the filthy, unhealthy environment. Rivers and streams caught fire. There was no air conditioning in cars then, and driving past Monsanto you had to roll the windows up in ninety five degree heat or the air would burn your lungs! Congress started the EPA in the seventies.
        Workplaces were hellish. Grandpa McGrew fell four stories down an elevator shaft because his employer, Purina, was too cheap to put doors on the elevators. Today we have OSHA.
        If you look at history, there have always been ups and downs, with more ups than downs. Every new discovery, every new invention lessens our present dystopia and has throughout history, but people seldom read history. Some people never read anything.
        I spoke of why youth believes in a dystopian future, but what about seniors? That’s something I can’t figure out. Maybe they have bad memories.
        Of course, as mentioned, we’re already seeing the climate changes brought on by global warming, and that will obviously create a dystopia, won’t it?
        Not necessarily. One of the stories in my Yesterday’s Tomorrows compilation is Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 2 B R 0 2 B. Like was widely feared at the time it was written, the world in Vonnegut’s future is greatly overpopulated at forty million people, and by the year 2000 people are eating seaweed. But although it was as dark as anything he wrote, it wasn’t dystopian. It starts:
                Everything was perfectly swell.
                There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
                All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
                Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
        In my preface to that story, I remarked that few writers seemed to have noticed advances in farm equipment, other farming technologies, or advances in chemistry, biology, agronomy, and other sciences needed to improve yields. The reality of his future and our present is that today there is plenty of food for everyone, and the only reason people go hungry is the politics of greed.
        I see the same happening with global warming. Evil money-worshiping men in high towers running oil wells and coal mines from a safe (to them) distance have tried to keep global warming under wraps, but it’s no longer possible for them. Their industries will die, and like the turn of the twentieth century, new industries will spring up, this time bringing clean energy. Like with farming equipment, windmills and solar panels will improve, and new technologies will spring up, particularly as new advances in science occur. Climate change is happening. We caused it, we can and will fix it.
        I don’t write dystopian SF because I simply don’t believe the future will be anywhere as dystopian as the present, and especially not as bad as the horrible past.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 24 2021, @09:08PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 24 2021, @09:08PM (#1159648)

    What about seniors? Well, they've got Medicare, they've got pensions, and as they get dementia they won't give a flying fuck anyway.

    Contrast that with the younger generations, who are aware of how precarious their future is.

    But all the writers missed the true essence of our dystopian disfunctional future. We have a couple of generations now who don't even know how to make smaytalk with strangers, who don't know how to make friends beyond the never-even-met-them faux fron fakebook, and even seniors now constrained to the shitty offerings of "seniors clubs."

    About the only ones left who you could put in a roomful of strangers and have any confidence that they haven't lost their ability to socialize are the dog owners who pretty much owned the streets after lockdown. Without the distraction of traffic, other pedestrians, etc., it was a golden opportunity to strike up new friendships.

    and new we see just how much most people have lost their socializing habits - even after lockdown the streets are pretty empty, as people sot in front of their screens to "socialize " with strangers, many of whom are not who they say.

    And like in 1984, the screens observe them, tirelessly categorizing everything they do.

    People who were essential workers whose physical presence on the job required human interaction and dog walkers came out of this less isolated than everyone else, who are still willingly hiding in their hives, so lonely.

    And mental health workers simply cannot fix this self imposed isolation, not when people are glued to the unreality of facebook and FOMO.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 25 2021, @09:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 25 2021, @09:19PM (#1159835)

    About seniors: "Do not go gentle into that good night." Of course Dylan Thomas only made it to age 39.

    About youngers: Imagine a generation where everything has been a lie, where beer and circuses are to keep you quiet.
    If we're lucky, the wars will take out the cell towers. Once the wars are over, I expect one group of starving sheep, and another of the formerly-cynical, those who just want to be left alone. to find their own fulfillment in rebuilding their own humanity.

    Rage, rage against the baaaaaaaaaa...

  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday July 26 2021, @04:05PM (1 child)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Monday July 26 2021, @04:05PM (#1160029) Homepage Journal

    as they get dementia they won't give a flying fuck anyway

    Most of the people I know are old. I don't know a single one with Alzheimer's, although they moved the 95 year old woman who lived next to me a decade to a nursing home because of it, and I knew a guy who shot himself because his wife had it.

    But all the writers missed the true essence of our dystopian disfunctional [sic] future. We have a couple of generations now who don't even know how to make smaytalk [sic]with strangers, who don't know how to make friends beyond the never-even-met-them faux fron [sic] fakebook, and even seniors now constrained to the shitty offerings of "seniors clubs."

    I've not seen any of that. "Couple of generations"? Few were on the internet at all before about 2005. The guy I buy my pot from is 24, he has lots of IRL friends, as did the young musicians I knew at the beginning of the century. Young people I meet in the bar have no trouble with small talk. What universe do you live in? Nothing you say corresponds to anything like reality in my universe.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27 2021, @04:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27 2021, @04:11AM (#1160276)

      Few were on the internet at all before about 2005

      I guess that's why you don't know anyone with dementia - you're too young and don't get around much. You seem to have missed the dialup internet era, as well as Compuserve, BBS, Minitel and Alex, etc.

      People have been withdrawing from society since before the internet, not interacting with their next door neighbours for 40 years or more.

      "Cocooning" was a big trend at one point, and this was before the big screen era.

      Talk to the wives - they're very much aware of theirmale partners mental degradation, even though the men deny it, as their short term memory is shot and all they talk about is stuff from 30 years ago. Because that's all they remember.

      And the men become angry out of frustration that they can no longer function properly, get violent, and end up in a home because the police have had to pull them off people they've attacked repeatedly.

      Once it gets to the point they're standing at the door oblivious that they're not in the toilet as they take a piss you know there's a problem. But the people around them hush it up because of the embarrassment - but they sure will be exchanging stories with other women as they look for emotional support and try to navigate what to do with someone who is no longer competent and may be a danger to everyone.

      I knew one guy barely 40 with Alzheimers. His wife could no longer handle it atop his MS, he went to live with his parents, they gave him the boot, so I took care of him for a couple of months. I didn't know that everyone had been hiding the Alzheimers (and Parkinsons) diagnosis from him, he only found out when he overheard me talking with his sister on the phone.

      There's a lot more than you can see because the mental deterioration may not be apparent to the casual observer if you pass them on the street or see them sitting on their porch. It's when you talk to them that you realize there's nobody home.

      And then there's people in their 40s and 50s with vascular dementia. A stroke is all it takes. Even if they recover physically, they can have a serious cognitive imparement. Not being able to manage their finances (sometimes the first clue others have is that they "forgot" to pay the bills for 6 months and are facing homelessness. Or you look in their fridge and the orange juice they swear they bought last week is lumpy and expired last year.

      They think they're functioning, but they're not. And you won't know until they're committed because you don't interact with them.