{"id":31732,"date":"2017-12-14T08:32:59","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T13:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=31732"},"modified":"2017-12-14T08:32:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T13:32:59","slug":"e-c-myers-remake-america-greater-than-it-ever-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2017\/12\/14\/e-c-myers-remake-america-greater-than-it-ever-was\/","title":{"rendered":"E.C. Myers: ReMake America Greater Than It Ever Was"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/serialbox.cachefly.net\/remade\/season2\/covers\/remade2_serial_landscape_1600x800_72dpi_wtext.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/serialbox.cachefly.net\/remade\/season2\/covers\/remade2_serial_landscape_1600x800_72dpi_wtext.jpg?resize=700%2C350&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"700\" height=\"350\" \/><\/a>Since Election Day 2016, there\u2019s been a steady stream of comments and memes on social media comparing the United States to [fill in your favorite\/popular\/overhyped dystopian fiction]. From Margaret Atwood\u2019s <em>The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> on Hulu to cracks about the Hunger Games, just when we thought dystopian fiction had worn out its welcome and it\u2019s finally time for sexy yetis or magical narwhals or whatever to be the Next Big Thing, the world changed dramatically almost overnight, and now we cling to those dystopian books as more than escapist fantasies\u2014they\u2019re primers for dealing with daily life and planning the revolution.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">2016: Trump won&#8217;t win.<\/p>\n<p>2017: President Trump can&#8217;t do that, can he?<\/p>\n<p>2018: You watching The Hunger Games tonight? I hope my District wins.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Eric Smith (@ericsmithrocks) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ericsmithrocks\/status\/704841254174117888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 2, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Or maybe people are just reaching for the easy jokes. But good comedy is usually based at least partly in truth, and humor is a longstanding coping strategy when things get completely awful. All kidding aside, for an increasing number of people living in America, things are getting pretty bad. The worst. People are literally dying as a result of the choices our current administration is making every day. If a self-interested, likely corrupt and compromised government hell-bent on disenfranchising, deporting, discrediting, dehumanizing, and outright killing its own citizens isn\u2019t a dystopia, then I don\u2019t know what is. So, perhaps we cling to dystopian stories now because as bad as things are, at least it isn\u2019t quite <em>that<\/em> bad yet\u2014or to help us prepare for what\u2019s coming\u2014just as children and teens read young adult fiction to get a preview of the embarrassment, relationships, and challenges that lie ahead for them.<\/p>\n<p>These days, for many years now, dystopian fiction and YA go hand in hand. There are lots of reasons for that\u2014high school is a kind of dystopia, adults are the establishment, and so on\u2014and consequently in the early days of 2017, many people, including myself, made references to waiting for teenagers to save the world.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Contrary to some comments I&#8217;ve seen: I&#8217;m glad my friends and I have kids. We&#8217;re gonna need teen protagonists to fix this dystopia we built.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 E. C. Myers (@ecmyers) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ecmyers\/status\/796421560991092736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 9, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Again, going for the easy punchline, but with an underlying flavor of truth. It makes sense that young adults would gravitate towards stories where teens tackle gross social injustice and change the world for the better, while picking up a boyfriend or girlfriend or two along the way. But a tremendous number of not-so-young adults are also reading this stuff, and always have been. Depending on who you ask on a given day, upwards of fifty percent of YA sales are to grownups. What\u2019s up with that? What could possibly be of interest in these books for people on the wrong side of high school graduation?<\/p>\n<p>The heart of good YA fiction is a character learning about their world and figuring out how they fit into it, and that doesn\u2019t stop once you become an adult with student loans and mortgages, jobs and children of your own\u2014and a world filled with big, seemingly impossible problems to solve like climate change and expensive healthcare and rampant sexual harassment and too many subscription services for streaming video. Back in the golden, olden days, when the world lived on the brink of nuclear war, people tended to stay in the same job for their whole lives. But these days, it\u2019s more common for people to change jobs every few years, maybe go back to school for a graduate degree, live on unemployment for a while, start their own business, and so on. We are all constantly reinventing ourselves as we find new places for ourselves in a changing world. Newsflash: adults don\u2019t have their acts together any more than teens do, and we\u2019re desperately searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. Yeah, we can still relate to YA fiction, and we need escapism more than ever.<\/p>\n<p>But another key element of YA fiction, especially dystopian YA fiction, is that one person\u2014or perhaps a band of preternaturally beautiful, scrappy, snarky teens\u2014can make a difference, albeit often at great personal sacrifice. They can change the world. They can <em>save<\/em> the whole damn world. And that\u2019s what all those jokes are about. We need that kind of optimism right now. Only just as your average YA protagonist can\u2019t wait for adults to come along to make everything better, it turns out that we can\u2019t wait for our kids to grow up and fix our mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, so what does all this have to do with <em>ReMade<\/em>? Fortunately, the teens in our series were killed before the 2016 presidential election, though they awakened in a distant future that clearly has seen its share of dystopias and is deadly in its own right, what with the lack of food and a surplus of killer robots. They have literally been remade\u2014faster, better, stronger\u2014and now, with the entire future they had planned lost to them forever, along with their friends, family, iPhones, and Instagram, most of them seize the rare opportunity to change their identity. Realizing that no one is coming to save them and there\u2019s no going back to the way things were, they rise to the challenge of surviving and saving the world.<\/p>\n<p>And I\u2019m seeing that happening now in America. A year after the election, people have stepped up in surprising, inspiring ways. Many who hate talking on the phone and to strangers have called their representatives, sent e-mails and letters, marched around the country for what they believe in. People who never had any interest in politics are running for office\u2014and winning! People are subscribing to and reading freaking newspapers again, which has to be a sign of the apocalypse. People are speaking up and speaking out against institutional racism and harassment, raising funds for human rights organizations and disaster relief. People are voting, even for local elections. If the America we know died on the night of January 20, 2017, then we have the opportunity to remake it, and ourselves and decide what kind of a nation we want to be.<\/p>\n<p>So imagine this farfetched scenario. Your parents are absent or dead. You\u2019ve just realized or accepted that the world is an ugly place and you can\u2019t trust your own leaders. You\u2019re under constant surveillance, manipulated by social media, and more people are suffering and dying every day. The polar ice caps are melting. What are you going to do?<\/p>\n<p>We are each the protagonist of this dystopian nonfiction. Forget about making America great again, whatever that means. It\u2019s always had room for improvement. Let\u2019s work together to remake it better than ever. No one is coming to save us, and it\u2019s up to us the save the damn world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<\/p>\n<p><em>E.C. Myers: assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published numerous short stories and four young adult books: the Andre Norton Award\u2013winning\u00a0Fair Coin,\u00a0Quantum Coin,\u00a0The Silence of Six, and\u00a0Against All Silence.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>His most recent work includes contributions to anthologies\u00a0Feral Youth,\u00a0Behind the Song,\u00a0Where the Stars Rise, and\u00a0A Thousand Beginnings and Endings(forthcoming). He is\u00a0<span class=\"qlink_container\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/RemadeS2tm\">also co-writing the YA science fiction serial ReMade for Serial Box Publishing, which begins its second season on 11\/15\/17<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at\u00a0<span class=\"qlink_container\"><a href=\"http:\/\/ecmyers.net\/\">http:\/\/ecmyers.net<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and on Twitter: @ecmyers.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>E.C. Myers: <a href=\"http:\/\/ecmyers.net\/\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Website<\/span><\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ecmyers\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>ReMade: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.serialbox.com\/serials\/remade\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Read @ Serial Box<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since Election Day 2016, there\u2019s been a steady stream of comments and memes on social media comparing the United States to [fill in your favorite\/popular\/overhyped dystopian fiction]. From Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale on Hulu to cracks about the Hunger Games, just when we thought dystopian fiction had worn out its welcome and it\u2019s finally [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-31732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-8fO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31732"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31735,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31732\/revisions\/31735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}