Of all the inputs of last week, I found this one so important to me. I love Octavia Butler. She gets me. And I read this article on Axios this week about Feb. 1 2025 being the date of a diary entry of her character Lauren Olamina in “Parable of the Sower”

We had a fire today. People worry so much about fire.”

In the dystopian novel, Lauren is living in a world too close to our own. Written in 1993, the character President Donner is radical and authoritarian and wins the presidency on a platform of, you guessed it,

Make America Great Again.

I thought Bulter was prescient in 2016. Boy was I in for a surprise. Right now as planes are arriving in Guatanimo Bay with detained migrants, fires have destroyed so much in California, and our nation has stopped celebrating Black History Month, its similarities are eerie. Once neighborhood looting begins, we’ll be there completely. And with the treasury in the control of a madman, you never know.

Anyway, I think about Butler time traveling as Dana, in Kindred, coming to 2025 from the 1990s. Maybe she saw MAGA hats, and the canceling of Black History Month at her library where she reportedly spent a lot of time. Maybe she came and saw the result of the fires last month, devastation of her old neighborhood, Altadena, CA.

As a writer, I think of the bigger picture and only then can find the details. But I wonder if Butler didn’t see the details first and then create the bigger picture. She understood at that time that racism would still be here, that fires would come to California because we couldn’t take care of and respect our planet, and maybe she could see how all the little things that Reagan was doing would bring us to this.

Maybe she, like other prophets, did see into our future.