Gabby Mintz lit log

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?” # 51 This line from Offred reflecting on his life before, with Hannah and Luke is simple but impactful. This realization is specific to Offred’s situation, but there’s something familiar about it. It’s the way people often can only really see and recognize their happiness when it is no longer present and the way normal complaints can suddenly seem like a luxury when viewed from a worse perspective. Margot Atwood is able to capture a real human feeling and experience in the moment, the realization of missing something when it is gone and the clarity that comes after things have already changed. What hits so deeply about this specific quote is the way it feels so realistic. People tend to focus so much on the bad parts of life, like what’s going wrong or what’s annoying us, that we tend to forget about the good. Offred had Luke and Hannah, she had freedom and a normal life, but she probably spent so much time worrying about the common things like work, stress and money. Now she is trapped in this horrible society where she’s been stripped of all her freedoms, she can’t even use her real name, and then looking back, all her old problems seem ridiculously small. This connects directly to the real world, when we think about the way we tend to view society changing, we often will feel nostalgic towards the past and romanticize what we had, but in the moment our problems still felt massive. This makes me think about the way my parents will talk about this generation and the way things were so much simpler when they were growing up, without social media and all the new technology, but im sure back then they were probably stressed about other things and didn’t realize they were living in what they would now probably call “ the good old days.” It’s almost like Margot Atwood is showing us a common pattern that occurs throughout history through this quote. People during Nazi Germany or the great depression probably looked back at times when things were normal and think the same thoughts “We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?” Or even more current times like the corona virus, we suddenly started wishing we had been grateful for simple things like grocery shopping and going to school when suddenly we were stuck in our homes. There’s constantly moments where society changes and everyone realizes the things they lost that they took for granted. If we constantly look back on times we miss, it’s scary to realize that at some point we will probably be missing right now. We could look back on 2025 and think all the things we currently worry about are not even a big deal. This quote also makes connections to how we view and talk about America compared to other countries. We constantly fight and complain about politics, the economy and other social issues and even though these complaints are completely valid and worth fighting for, if we look at countries like Afghanistan where women can’t even go to school or places like north korea with insane dictatorship, we realize that with all of our problems, we still have these freedoms that millions of people would do anything for. I think that’s one of the reasons the handmaid’s tale is such a scary book. Margot Atwood isn’t writing about a different planet nothing like ours, she is showing a society that looks like ours but could turn into the horrors of the handmaid’s tale. The women in the book used to have freedoms like American women, who never realized that they would lose the most basic rights. This represents the ways that democracy and freedom can be changed. We learn and read about societies that collapsed or turned into dictatorships but it never seems realistic. Margot Atwood’s quote shows us that people living this probably felt the same, they were just normal women dealing with regular problems, when everything changed. This is why this quote is so impactful because it’s not just about Offred missing her old life but also telling of how quickly things can change.