Please Come With Me by Douglas

[Rutabaga]

I could not find a thread for this, although some of my search attempts generated long pages of syntax errors and other gobbledegook. (This was when searching on the term "Douglas.")

Anyway, although I'm not generally a fan of dystopic fiction, this was fairly interesting.

http://awesomedude.com/douglas/please_come_with_me.htm

R

[Pedro]

I read this a couple of years back and found it all too believable given the rantings and ascendancy of religious extremists of all flavours of religion.

Another story, equally powerful and disturbing and released about the same time is Nigel Gordon's 'The Compassionate, The Merciful'. It is set in the real world, not a dystopian future.

http://www.awesomedude.com/nigel_gordon/compassionate__the_merciful.htm

I found reading the second while whichever I read first was still fresh in my memory enhanced the impact of both.

Both well with a read.

[colinian]

I think Douglas's Come With Me is one of the scariest stories I've ever read. It's the sort of thing that's too f'ing possible these days.

Colin

[PeterSJC]

Please Come with Me is one of my favorite stories here. Even while re-reading it, I was caught up in the drama of whether our heros would escape. I recently posted a link to it in a Facebook thread about current events. I don't really think we will get to how things are in the story, but I never thought we would get this far down the road to theocracy, either.

[DesDownunder]

We might as well have allowed the Nazis and fascists to have won WWII because, at the moment it certainly seems like they won.

Evil people have mounted our hopes with threats of terror; terror that comes from madness. It's the madness of human destructiveness to destroy all that cannot be made subservient to the egos of the insane. Yet in defeat, they still may win by their retreat, which leaves only burning fields, drowning lands and dreams that no longer exist in the scattered bones of life.

All that remains is our dark planet, which once crowned evolution with life and love. Resist, resist the efforts of those who would cheat the cosmos of its children and its future.
 

[JamesSavik]

I've tried to stay out of this but the hysteria is a little appalling.

Nazis may as well have won? 

Isn't that a just tad over the top? 

There is a reason we got Trump. 

 

[ChrisR]

7 hours ago, DesDownunder said:

All that remains is our dark planet, which once crowned evolution with life and love.

Des, the prose is grand, but just when in the history of mankind did we live in this "life and love" world? Even the Bible tells us that when there were only 4 humans present, one of them killed off a quarter of the human race - a percentage not even approached ever since. (Except the one time where God killed off nearly everybody for being bad. Hmm.) Perhaps it truly is our nature.

 

And James, the ranter is right, but isn't it somehow counterproductive that he's screaming at us the whole time he's telling us how stupid it is not to talk with one another?

[DesDownunder]

Sadly, it has become commonplace to confuse our nature with our behaviour. Even if our actions are influenced by our behaviour patterns, that does not mean they are our only influence. Indeed, it should be argued that behaviour is secondary to our human instincts from which we evolve and grow our intellects, our intelligence and our psyche.            

When we see and succumb to evil behaviour patterns, which sidestep our instincts, hysteria may well be our response, but from that we may also salvage the inherent goodness living, and growing inside us.

[PeterSJC]

At the risk of straying even further from the topic of this story, I have to respond to the ranter linked in James Savic's post. I agree with his main premise—that the Democrats put up Clinton, thinking that anybody could beat Trump—but he oversimplifies. Trump got a sufficient minority of the votes because people hated Clinton in a way that no amount of discussion could have overcome. And this is fed by where they choose to get their news. Here in an Oregon town that voted 76% for Trump (and 16% for Clinton), I've seen this bumper sticker: "I don't believe mainstream media." And I visited a friend who had Alex Jones, IIRC, informing us about the child-sex ring that the Clinton's ran out of the white house. I spend a lot of my Facebook time trying to swat down bogus stories—from the left, as well as the right—that could be disproven by a simple visit to Snopes.

We can't have the discussion that the ranter—who is that guy, anyway?—wants when each side has its "alternative facts." 

Trump was better than Clinton in tapping into fear. In a recent study, three UCLA researchers posited that conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe fake news that feeds fear: http://www.danielmtfessler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Fessler-et-al-in-press-Political-Orientation-Credulity.pdf

peter

[PeterSJC]

In today's news, citizens of Rienzi, Mississippi, say that they are taking a stand and fighting for their religious freedom. I suspect that if you asked them whether you they would like the society depicted in Please Come With Me, many of them would say yes: https://www.facebook.com/topic/Rienzi-Mississippi/103815086324265?source=whfrt&position=3&trqid=6383809462532531995