Bringing All the Bad, стр. 129

In this case, when that woman responded to her friend that she would die rather than live without agency, it changed a great deal in my brain. It always baffled me that women had remained so chained throughout history. I simply couldn’t understand why fifty percent or more of the population would allow such a thing.

I even asked my grandmother about that once when I was young and dealing with being a female in the military during the waning days of the 1980s (which was all kinds of kray-kray). I remembered asking something like this, “Why did you guys put up with this shit?” Her answer had been telling. She’d said something like this. “Don’t use nasty language. Men think women who curse are crass.”

Ironic, no?

Unlike most maligned groups in history, women have almost never been a numerical minority, which makes them almost unique in the history of chained peoples. In fact, for much of history, we were probably a majority. Fighting would have been possible…in theory. So, why didn’t they fight?

The witch burnings, the honor killings, the religion-based persecution, the genital mutilation…well…the list goes on and on. I’ve never understood the concept of not fighting such horrors. Except, well, a lot of this is still going on and what am I doing? I’m sitting at a keyboard writing books. How, exactly, am I fighting these horrors in any real and concrete way?

I think it’s even worse because most men are awesome. Most men exist within cultural contexts that don’t promote or allow such behavior. Most men would fight right alongside the persecuted, as they have done in every single conflict in history. How many men died in World War II fighting for the agency of people in countries they’d never visited? How many fought in the Civil War to free the slaves? How many went to the pyre for speaking out for a woman? Too many to count.

So why didn’t they fight? I think the answer is sadly simple. I think they, along with the women, often felt it was too big to fight. An immovable tide pushed by an immovable moon.

When injustices feel too big to fight against, the result is giving up. The result is voting and hoping the people in power will, for once, do the right thing instead of the greedy or extreme thing. The result is keeping your head down, hoping it doesn’t happen to you, and trying hard not to hear when it happens to someone else. Sometimes, it means siding with the persecutors to ensure one’s own safety.

And sometimes, it means simply dying to get away from all that horror.

Obviously, I took this concept to an absolute extreme in this novel. And, in this novel, we don’t know exactly why The Dying happened in the first place. Was it a doomsday cult releasing a bioweapon that was never fully identified? Was it a sect of extreme greens who thought humanity was a noxious pest on the earth? Was it a god passing judgement? Was it nature finally getting sick of our shit?

We don’t know and we shouldn’t know, because it’s not important to the story. What’s important is that four women all chose—or found themselves taking—a different path when the world changed. Did you catch that they were all related?

Ultimately, I don’t know any answers to anything in this world. I only know that every choice we make is one step down a path we create for ourselves throughout our lives. The path is twisty and convoluted, but there is one thing all the paths we create do. Each path will either make the world better or it will make the world worse.

There is no neutral path. There is no middle way.

It’s up to each of us to decide, with each step we take, if we’re on the path we want the world to reflect. Since no one is perfect, we won’t always take the right step…and who is to decide when that step is right or wrong? Just because we know we can’t be perfect, and our path might be a small one amongst mighty freeways, we should never stop trying. That’s what I believe. That’s what I try to do…sometimes quite badly. I think my path is as twisty as any.

But that’s the true beauty of these paths we make with our lives. Because they are twisty and convoluted, we can take a whole lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.

Reader, I hope our paths cross again. I hope we can walk in tandem for a while, creating a good path that will become a freeway from many pairs of feet, all walking together to create a far better road for the future.