Parables

I finished reading Parable of the Talents yesterday, and while a part of me wishes I had read it much earlier in life--not because the younger me would have enjoyed it more, but because I could have had its messages with me all this time--this is definitely an appropriate time in the history of our country and world to have undertaken it.

I have a nagging curiosity about whether the campaign staff of the asshole sitting in the White House had read this book, because the demagogue who gets voted President in the book literally uses the phrase "make America great again" more than once.  But then I give a bitter laugh because there's no way in hell anyone associated with that campaign has read the work of a black, female science fiction writer.

I really, really like the Earthseed belief system in this book and Parable of the Sower.  While it is not exactly the way I would shape my own energy and efforts, it really does feel true.  And the verses that begin each chapter of the books are lovely and apropos to our times, to wit:

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.

I highly recommend both of these books, which do not shy away from bleakness and misery, but have real gems of hope in them regardless.