This week, I attended a Flora’s Film Friday in which we watched the sci-fi thriller “What Happened to Monday”. The movie followed the Settman sisters, who are identical septuplets living in a society with a one-child policy. They all have their own personalities within the confines of their apartment, but outside of those walls, they are all Karen Settman. With the government on to them, the Child Allocation Bureau (CAB) is hunting them down one by one to cover up the fact that seven siblings were able to maneuver through the world without getting caught for 30 years.

The biggest sticking point of the movie was how real the government felt and how the actions it took are not too different from every government around the globe. Dr. Cayman, the head of the CAB, used doublespeak repeatedly during her speeches. While the truth is that she killed every sibling, she would say that the siblings would wake up to a better future. She would say that she was saving the human race, but in reality she was killing countless people. Doublespeak is used constantly by politicians and was one of the most effective tools used by murderous regimes like Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. For instance, the policy that directly lead to the death of 60 million Chinese citizens in the span of 25 years was called “The Great Leap Forward”. The irony in the name speaks for itself.

Magdala, the GRF hosting the event, wanted to focus on how power controls the masses and spoke about the Patriot Act in America. The thing she said that was most interesting about that was how once government takes power over a certain domain, it never returns it. The Patriot Act was supposed to be a temporary measure during the war on terror, but it has been in place for 15 years now. This is not the first, or last, example of this happening in America alone. The federal income tax was historically used as a temporary measure to fund wars. Lincoln used it to fund the civil war and it was repealed in 1872. However, once Woodrow Wilson reestablished it to help fund World War I efforts, he helped it become a constitutional amendment and now the income tax is an unquestioned function of government. The question lies, if that can happen at any point, if we don’t stop bad policy from passing today, will our kids even question whether or not it is a bad policy?