Parable of the Sower and Fostering Community

To those anxious about the future: Choose to trust others.

The Summer of the 2024

Mark Abramson/NewYorkTimes

Since I had recently left college, I had been tentatively spiraling over my purpose and place amongst my family and friends. I have been a bit restless lately as well. With having lost the community I have cultivated for myself in college and being in a weird purgatory of not immediately going back to school or work. Trying to stay sane by building a routine for myself and not let myself become anxious from going out into an everchanging world.

Recently I had taken up reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and her post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction on a future America set in 2024. Her work, although already very iconic, has been getting picked up by younger readers and the BookTok community online for her storytelling and forethought for the socio-economic and political future as Americans. Funnily enough the 1993 novel, that starts off during our current year (July 20th, 2024 in fact!) and embraces many topics about climate change, racism, sexism, inflation, the job market, and so on that are happening in an unfortunately familiar way.

The story emphasizes the importance of community and fostering a way for survival. The main character Lauren Olamina, seeing the imminent fall of her community, continues to prep for the day where they all have to come together and fend for themselves and a better future against raiders and thieves and a continued falling economy. She tries to invoke a sense of alert amongst the deteriorating community, even though the people around her stay complacent and close-minded to the worsening world around them. A story and premise that is all too familiar to the world that I have seen around me for the past several years.

---

Fear and Complacency

AR on Unsplash

So often in the past few years, I have seen the sentiment of younger people wanting to organize and find community in one another amongst a seemingly chaotic society. There is not a week that goes by that my Tiktok isn’t littered with posters that want to find ways to find friends and acquaintances with similar values. Who also see the imminent crashing and burning of their own home country and want to do the best they can to feel safe and loved amongst the chaos. It is not a coincidence that spaces online, like Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook are places that information is spread around about protests or pop-ups for important social issues. Where there are people that want to come together and find unity amongst each other where they do not see it in their everyday life. People are crying out to strangers online in hopes that there are people out there that share the same fears, hopes, and interests.

A culmination of these fears is the reason that Parable of the Sower is gaining momentum in a time where many younger people are starting to become dissatisfied with increasing rent, political strife, and increasing social justice issues. Many times in the beginning of the book the main character Lauren even expresses the felling of loss of a future, the crazy amount of heat, and the dissatisfaction of political leaders. I actually started writing this piece around the same time the first political debate between Biden and Trump of this year alongside the many Supreme Court decisions that grace us every summer. Where there has been a following a many doomerist thought circling both online and in real life. Many different thoughts concerning the future of our country and the spiraling disconnect between politicians and citizens. Rich and poor.

“‘Maybe, but none of it matter. I won’t be able to afford college. I won’t be able to get a job or move out of my parents’ house because no job I would get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.’”

- Joanne Garfield in Parable of the Sower

Many Americans online have been talking about how they would like to leave the country. Start over somewhere else and and taking root in another highly white-democratic European country. As if similar things aren’t becoming a pattern in other countries as well, but I digress. To be honest, and I hate to burst any bubbles here, but that grand idea of moving out of the country to escape elsewhere will only really work for the lucky ones and those with enough resources to do so. Not everyone can pack their bags and leave and not every country will be open and compatible for every America fleeing out the way. People have lives here already, people have roots and families. Tragedy arises in the idea of leaving those who cannot afford to leave, to be doomed to the fate of leaders who do not care. There is more that we can do for each other. Things we should do for each other to maintain our peace and survival against an oppressive livelihood.

---

The Sharer

I then think to hope that the general public realizes that no one wins in the scenario of being complacent or doomed to their own reality. And certainly not through the possibility that leaving will solve everything. Many places are facing the same things and not everywhere is perfect. Lauren realizes that well enough by the end of the book. We can no longer be avoidant to any of these issues and going to another country will not help build better circumstances for yourself or the people you care about. Bettering the world around you, will. People can feel the tides shifting in every country and fleeing to other places will not help the core issues. Not to say that the fear isn’t warranted, but there is meaning to purposefully fighting against the reality that you fear.

Lauren Olamina is Hyperempathetic, otherwise known in the book as a “Sharer”. She is someone that can experience and take in someone’s emotion on a very physical level. Someone is happy, and therefore she feels euphoric. Someone is getting beat up or hurt, she feels all of that and more. And in the world that she lives in, she feels the latter more than the former. In a world where her hyperempathy would be seen as a weakness, something to hold her back, I actually think there is something to her hyperempathy that allows her to find strength in being helpful and fostering a community amongst those in her neighborhood. Her empathy is actually the part of her that saves her and saves the people around her. Not the hyper individualism that many other people in the story has carried amongst themselves over the many years of societal breakdown. But by sharing (pun intended) her knowledge and her supplies with those that need it and gaining trust of the people around her. Lauren does have her fair share of skepticism though, she is not a complete pacifist and knows what she must do to survive. But simply, at her center, is the need for community care and wanting to build something that will last.

“A gathering of Earthseed is a good and necessary thing. It vents emotion, then quiets the mind. It focuses attention, strengthens purpose, and unifies people.”

-Lauren Olamina writing Earthseed: The Books of the Living

“God is Change. Shape God.”

I implore those who wish to have change or even be safe amongst dangerous change in the world, to care and find community with one another. To those you share values with. To help foster a mindset of staying stronger together with other. As it is evaluated by Lauren’s Earthseed: The Book of the Living, change is neither good or bad, but to be able to shape change by embracing it, then there is no limit to what you may be able to accomplish. That can be overcome by unity.

Lauren believes in the idea that God is Change. And that by embracing change and yielding to it as it shapes the world around us, then we are also shaping God by taking advantage of the world around us. Things change. The world often changes. It is better to make the change work for us and utilize it the best that we can, however we can. Even as it seems like the world is falling apart in front of us.

We must also comes to terms with however, the reality that there are those that do not foster that want of need for community. That often scoff at the possibility to organize and find sympathy with one another during times of need. Not everyone will see the danger when they are knee deep in it and some people will see the danger and embrace it. This mindset can help be changed with time, to those who are open to hear it. Some, however, will not want to be moved on the notion of finding community or that organizing with others will work. We must come to terms with that. We must come to terms that there are people who do not wish to participate in that world or are too scared to hear it. There is no helping that and it is important to focus your energy on the things that you can do, instead of the things that you can’t.

“‘Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With Action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.’”

-Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower

Three keys of the World

Riccardo Atrot on Unsplash

I have always longed for closer community. Through my hobbies, when I went to college, around the neighborhood I live in, and even in online spaces. I have always wished for the continued support of my peers and the continued support of those I love. Centered on learning from each other and sharing our values with one another. Centered in idea of helping and cherishing what we do and do not have.

I am young and vulnerable. I am malleable and open to change. But I am also scared for my future and disconnected from the world around me. In these times of obvious social unrest, but also social loneliness, I think to myself how I can build up this anxiety and shape it into something new. How I can bring myself to form myself with people that I can trust. A new graduate that doesn’t tend to get out of their comfort zone would surely have a hard time. Especially in a time that tends to be online or so distant.

Now, I am young and I do not know all the answers to how to solve this issue. I do not know what would 100% work and how to maintain something that will work and be beneficial for everyone.

I do however have taken away some things from Lauren and her experience in Parable of the Sower that are key points of community building and surviving in the world:

1. Set boundaries with people that do not align with your overall vision and goals for life. You do not have to agree on everything, as I do not even agree on everything the people in my life say, but there must be a common idea that you all must share at the end of it all. Lauren, when taking in strangers to her group (Earthseed), she shares her ideas, but never forces them onto the others. The end goal however is to always protect the group, and you cannot be involved with them if you do not participate in the betterment of their livelihood.

2. Be prepared and stay vigilant (to the extent of whatever prepared looks like to you)! Lauren, with the sense of impending danger, had made an emergency backpack for the worst case scenario. She had planned out what to do when the worst went wrong and how to then survive when push comes to shove. People of course, have back-ups and emergency packs for natural disasters primarily. But the world that Lauren lived in was quick and violent, and who is to say that that isn’t something akin to a disaster?

3. Rely on each other. Everyone has a skill. Everyone has a set of knowledge that they can give to each other. Everyone has a purpose and can contribute in some way. Even the smallest of ways. Feed on that and rely on that. Grow and participate with the people around you. Having a community and being able to have trust that they will help you and verse versa is something that can save your life one day. Even in a scenario where the world isn’t on fire. In Robledo (the town where Lauren grows up), there is untapped information everywhere. In the books that no one reads, in the people around town, even when she is listening to her father at church. She used all of that to her advantage and those skills ended up saving her life in the end.

I think that its also important to say that there is no shame in taking up space with communities online either. Those who you admire and take comfort into online can surely be a safe haven and just as important as those you meet in real life. Sometimes it may be easier to take note from people that you know share common interest, even if you have never formally met them. I think in some sense, we have moved past the need of being highly skeptical of ever online stranger (although do take their advice and guidance with a grain of salt if you feel inclined to). But please do also try to find people in your offline world to take some trust in and to be your teachers in life as well.

I want to take this time in my life where I am trying to maintain relationships and build new ones as I continue into my 20s, to deeply take these points to heart. Where I deeply find myself considering the people that I surround myself with or the ways that I go about protecting myself from a dangerous world. I am young and new to life and the world is scary. I know that I cannot do this alone and I will not walk this life alone either. You should not walk life without some support or without the knowledge of others. Follow the idea of Earthseed, where things constantly change and alleviate yourself from the anxiety of a changing world. Band together with the people that you can trust and build a community you can count on.

“‘Everyone who’s surviving out here knows things that I need to know…I’ll watch them, I’ll listen to them, I’ll learn from them. If I don’t, I’ll be killed.’”

-Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower