“Everything is under control”

I first read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in July of 1992. It was the summer before my senior year in high school. Along with reading, my diary recounts days spent babysitting my two-year-old sister, practicing piano and typing, making dinner using a new-fangled product called Boboli, taking tennis lessons, listening to Janis Joplin, and accompanying my mother to her doctor appointments for the baby due that August.

My 17-year-old assessment of the book? “Very, very creepy. It seems almost possible.”

My 42-year-old assessment? “Very, very creepy. It seems almost possible.”

Using my new-fangled Kindle, I highlighted the following as plausible:

“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.”

“Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”

“As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.”