A couple weekends back, I found myself binge-watching Hulu's Handmaids Tale, which I had some familiarity having read the book back in college (I remember liking Cats Eye more in my Atwood fanaticism). At the time, we were firmly in Clinton era and the plotline seemed incredibly unlikely, even dated a little in its 80's-ness. The world that successfully had spawned Gilead seemed like an impossibility--given that in the mid-90's we were in the dawn of the internet age. How could something like a government take-over and subjugation of women happen in a world that was so connected, where everyone was watching. And that, truly, is where this re-incarnation of the story succeeds so well, and scared the bejeezus out of me. Set in the contemporary, we see the cell phones, we see the modern media. And yet, it happens. One day, you have a job and a bank account, and the next you do not. It seems extreme, but hey, none of us, a couple years ago even imagined that THIS world would exist. With what is happening now in government, it made me enormously uneasy, when after staying up most of the night watching the show, my morning facebook scrolling produced a mix of troubling abortion overturns, multiple sexual assault cases, and just general political fuckery.
There is a great scene where the heroine is hiding in the former offices of the Boston Globe, cutting out newspaper clippings from the time before, creating a map of the chaos, the tiny bits that added up to the complete overturning. Those facebook bits seem like tiny isolated things, but they've started to coalesce in alarming ways under this administration. I want to believe people are fundamentally good and vigilant enough to not let these sorts of things happen. That the internet makes us smarter and more aware. But maybe not. Maybe it makes us dumber and more myopic.
And it's scary. A friend and I were discussing how many people, at any given time, are so bogged down in survival, in their own existence, their own worlds that they don't notice what is happening around them until it's too late. I always wondered about Nazi Germany, and how many people were horrified to look up one day and really see what was happening while they were not paying attention. Years ago, I myself had to limit my exposure to the news for my own well-being--the amount of violence toward women had hit a harrowing peak--murders, rapes, mysterious disappearances--and I had to stop lest I fall from it. As such, and for my own metal health, I don't pay as much attention as I probably should. Especially given that my predominant source of information continues to be social media, which is never a good thing.
I fear that you could take all these strands and pull and a dozen similar things will fall out as well. In the 90's it seemed safe to assume that as a society we were moving forward without danger of moving back, but now, I don't know....
