The Handmaid’s Tale was written by Margaret Atwood in 1985, addressing very serious problems we may potentially face in the dystopian future of America.
In 2017, the first episode the of Handmaid’s Tale series was aired on Hulu, immediately raising eyes. In a world where a woman’s job is to serve a man, with fertile women being raped to be carry children for families, with no acceptance of freedom of expression – a world no one wants to live in.
The main character June, played by Elisabeth Moss, and also known as Offred, focuses on escaping this dystopian society to find her family from “before.” She fights against Gilead who then punishes her over and over again for it. She is one of the only people who attempts to make the world a place where everyone wants to live in, not by the violent demanding actions of society.
As gory and repulsive the events in the show are, it’s a show we must all be paying attention to. It depicts what global warming, something people refuse is happening, is doing to the Earth. It addresses the issues of rape and how people turn a blind eye to victims, something we have seen in huge recent court cases. It degrades women to property and men to either leaders of their world or killers.
With the recent devastation of the Notre Dame fire, billionaires have donated all of their money to repairing this monument. But what about other natural disasters? Like the people that lost their homes to wildfires in California, or the plastic cleanup in the ocean, or saving wildlife and their habitats? These are all very large problems our world is facing, yet we decide to spend our money elsewhere.
We see our government going elsewhere rather than focusing on problems we need to start paying attention to. We have seen our recent president degrade women and retract transgender members of our military. We saw something similar to this in the beginning of Gilead.
We want to act like nothing is happening and afraid of being a part of change, but if we continue to do this, we will be a part of a bigger problem. We need to take The Handmaid’s Tale as a warning to what may happen.
You cannot give up: