I’m a big dystopia fan. The “what ifs” on how our world will look in 10, 20, 30 or even 100 years fascinates me. Will our world be destroyed and everyone has to go back to living without technology. Will our world be filled with the most advanced technology with mini computers implanted under the skin or will there even be a world left to sustain life.
In VOX by Christina Dalcher, we see a scary kind of future. One where a crazy religious zealot has the ear of the President convincing him women should be silenced. For centuries women have always been considered second class citizens and fight every day for equal rights. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Then sometimes what we have won gets stripped away. I’ve never understood why men in power feel they have the right to decide what should happen to women’s bodies.
In Vox, women no longer have free will to talk. They are limited to 100 words a day. A year before, a metal bracelet has been locked onto the wrists of every female in the country including little girls as small as a year old, silencing girls even before they learn speech. As the female speaks, the counter goes down until you hit zero, wait for midnight for the counter to start over. Speak more than 100 words and you are lightly zapped. Keep going and you could fry to death as the zaps get stronger.
Work? Read? Make a phone call? Forget it. All rights are gone. Women can’t even retrieve the mail. Now all women are good for is to cook, clean, and rear children. If you are gay, forget it. All gays are locked into a prison until they “convert” to heterosexual. One female and one male placed into the same cell in hopes the conversion works.
Have an infraction? Good-bye family and get ready to be shamed on national TV then shipped off to serve hard labor working on a farm or cleaning fish for a living. No males in your family to take care of you? Head to the farm or worse yet, be shipped off to a “pleasure house” for the men who can afford to visit.
The women losing their rights didn’t happen overnight. Just like the Jews during the Holocaust didn’t lose their rights overnight. Slowly fewer women were in government. Women started losing their rights then BAM! One executive order changed everything. That one executive order is the one thing that scared the crap out of me while reading this story.
With the current nutcase in the White House with his super religious sidekick who calls his wife Mother, you don’t know what could happen. Look at how the white supremacists are rising in this country and now around the world. Their voices are slowly growing as people of color are being shot and killed for no reason. Look how the families are ripped apart at the southern border with children possibly lost forever. Look at how relief aid is being taken away from Puerto Rico.
We are living in a scary world right now and sometimes it feels like we can’t stop the roller coaster from plunging down the big drop. That is what I felt like listening to this book. Watching what his happening around the country, I believe it only takes one to start the ball rolling and brainwash people. Someone close to me was very open minded, now she believe what is happening at the southern border with families ripped apart is fine. She likes the current White House occupant. She likes Steve King from Iowa. I don’t even know who this person is anymore, their views have swung so far to the other side.
In VOX, the children are learning new lessons, where life is easier if women are at home, not speaking and following along to whatever the males in their lives tell them. A lot of the young kids are brainwashed and start to “drink the kool-aid” with what is shoved down their throats in school. Children’s minds are easily manipulated as they haven’t seen what happened before. If they are not learning about the past like the Holocaust, how will they learn an atrocity like that could exist. How will they understand about equal rights? The world could swing in so many different ways and VOX is not one I would every want to see happen in this country.
Look at what is going on in this country right now and then ask yourself, could something like V0X happen?
Book Description:
Set in an America where half the population has been silenced, VOX is the harrowing, unforgettable story of what one woman will do to protect herself and her daughter.
On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than 100 words daily, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial—this can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her.
This is just the beginning.
Soon women can no longer hold jobs. Girls are no longer taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words a day, but now women only have one hundred to make themselves heard.
But this is not the end.
For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.
Until next time…enjoy the view from your passenger seat
Views from the Passenger Seat 