Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [312]

“Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 312

Note

An inversion of the conventional ‘change is gradual’ comfort: the narrator reframes the catastrophe as a normal property of time, with the difference being only rate — ‘one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take.’ ‘Anchored in the past’ does the diagnostic work of a whole sociology in two words, and the doubled ‘waiting’/‘come back’ at either end closes the paragraph like a trap.